This year’s discussion is all about the scores, or more accurately, the declining scores. Even though JIFs had experienced some decline overall in the 2023 JCR, this had come on the heels of 2 consecutive years of substantial rises, so some correction was expected. In the 2024 JCR we saw average JIFs decline across the board in almost all categories, across almost all publishers (Table 1).

Table 1. Comparing JIF averages by publisher, 2022 versus 2023. For comparison, data includes the 68 categories in which LWW publishes journals.

Lippincott publishes journals in 68 Web of Science categories. Including all publishers, the average JIF fell in 65 of those 68 categories, with declines as high as 30% in Infectious Disease. Only Nuclear Science and Technology (+9%) and Oncology (+4%) saw the average JIF increase. The average JIF for all 68 categories decreased from 3.4 to 2.9 (-14%).

So does this mean that all of a sudden in the last 2 years journals are of lower quality? Of course not, just as the sudden rise in JIFs in 2020 did not mean that journals suddenly were of higher quality.

What Happened?

Authors have been told that JIF is an indicator of overall journal quality, and naturally if the JIF drops, that must mean that the quality has dropped. However, that is a deeply flawed assumption given that the JIF is impacted by trends in publishing that have absolutely nothing to do with journal quality. For example, there is a clear correlation between annual research output and JIF. The more articles published in a year, the more citations in that year; and higher citations lead to higher JIFs overall.

Figure 1. Research output indexed in Web of Science, 2005-2023. Decline in 2022 and 2023 highlighted.

That growth effectively created JIF inflation, and contributed to a growing perception that JIFs should always go up, with little reason to question the drivers causing that growth. After all, if the JIF improved, it must have been the result of a successfully executed editorial strategy.

Is a decline in JIF always bad?

It’s important to recognize that the JIF’s value is as a relative measure when compared to other journals in the same category. The JIF by itself provides no value. A commonly asked question online, “Is a JIF of 5 good?” In Oncology it wouldn’t crack the top 60, in Nursing it would rank number 2.

Traditionally, we use category rankings to assess how journals in the same field compare. However, this year naturally provided further confusion because of Clarivate changes. In the 2024 JCR, Clarivate introduced unified rankings, meaning that for the first time, titles in the same category, but different editions (e.g., SCIE, ESCI, SSCI) were combined into a single ranking. The upshot of this (plus the introduction of ties) meant that it was a difficult to compare individual journal rankings to previous years. Combining the editions also meant that for most categories, the number of titles increased. As a result, we saw journals with lower JIFs, lower rankings, but improved quartiles. If your journal ranking went from 20 to 30, but moved from the 2nd quartile to the 1^st, did the journal do better or worse than last year?

Embracing JIF Percentile

To try and make sense of the ranking changes, it may be beneficial to focus instead on JIF percentile – the percentage of journals in the subject category with a lower JIF. This establishes a more universal metric to measure a journal’s relative performance. In fact, Clarivate’s intent was for JIF Percentile to be used to compare journals across different categories. If the JIF goes up or down (often driven as we’ve established by external factors), the JIF Percentile can indicate if the journal’s relative performance has shifted correspondingly. In many cases, JIF Percentile remains steady, despite the year-to-year fluctuations of the JIF itself.

Conclusion

The JIF serves two primary purposes for most journals: a marketing tool to attract submissions, and as measure of a journal’s relative quality. For authors, who largely interact with JIF as a marketing tool, it would help them and journals to understand the mechanisms that effect the JIF, and to expand their assessments beyond a single number that is too often placed at the forefront of journal promotion. If you have access to the Web of Science, look at other journal metrics to create a more comprehensive picture of a journal’s performance. Ask the journal to provide additional data, eg, ranking, JIF percentile.