You may have seen this recent post from Clarivate describing changes in their rankings methodology, which will be in use for the first time in this year's JCR.

We will no longer provide separate JIF rankings for the nine subject categories that are indexed in multiple editions. For example, the Psychiatry category is included in both Science Citation Index – Expanded (SCIE)™ and Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI)™ and we currently publish a separate Psychiatry ranking for each edition. We will replace these separate rankings with a single, unified ranking. 

In the past, journals were ranked within their edition, eg, ranking journals in ESCI to other ESCI journals, SCIE to SCIE and so on. For journals that were in more than one edition (many nursing journals are in both SCIE and SSCI), they would receive 2 different rankings - one for each edition.

Starting with the 2024 JCR, editions will be combined into a single ranking; for example, all radiology journals in ESCI and SCIE will be combined into a single ranking.

How will this impact rankings? Firstly, since ESCI journals now have Impact Factors and will be combined with SCIE journals, the number of journals in each ranked category will almost certainly increase. Since ESCI journals have mostly lower JIFs on average, they will likely inhabit the bottom quartile, pushing some SCIE journals into a higher quartile despite their JIF remaining the same.

Bottom line: Any comparison of journal ranking between 2024 and 2023 will be problematic, just as comparing JIFs from 2023 to 2022 was made more difficult by the change in JIF being displayed to only one decimal.