Metrics

What is Journal Citation Reports (JCR)?

Q: What is Journal Citation Reports?

Clarivate’s annual report of journal-level citation metrics, including the Journal Impact Factor. The 2026 edition covers 22,643 journals in 254 categories.

Q: When is JCR released?

Every June. The 2025 edition was released on 18 June 2025 and the 2026 edition on 17 June 2026.

Q: Is JCR free?

JCR is reached through Clarivate’s product login, usually via a library. The Master Journal List, which confirms whether a journal is indexed in Web of Science, is free.

Clarivate’s annual journal metrics report — the only source of the Journal Impact Factor. What is in it, what changed, and how to reach it. Figures from Clarivate’s own pages.

Sources read 16 October 2026

Journal Citation Reports (JCR) is Clarivate’s annual release of journal-level citation metrics and the only source of the Journal Impact Factor. The 2026 edition, released on 17 June 2026 with 2025 data, covers 22,643 journals in 254 categories from 113 countries; 521 journals received their first Impact Factor. Clarivate states the indicators are meant for evaluating journals, not individual researchers or articles.

What a JCR journal profile shows

Metric	What it measures
Journal Impact Factor (JIF)	Citations in the JCR year to items from the previous two years, divided by the citable items from those two years.
JIF without self-cites	The same, with the journal’s citations to itself removed.
5-Year JIF	The same ratio over five years (in the All Years view).
Journal Citation Indicator (JCI)	Field-normalised citation impact; the average journal in a category scores about 1.
Rank, quartile, percentile	Position in each subject category, for JIF and for JCI.
Immediacy Index	How quickly items are cited in their year of publication.
Eigenfactor, Normalized Eigenfactor, Article Influence Score	Network-weighted citation measures.
Total citations and citation distribution	Raw counts behind the ratios.
Open access data	Share of Gold open access items and of the citations they receive.
Contributions by organisation and country/region	Who publishes in the journal.
Cited and citing half-life	Age profile of citations (All Years view).

From Clarivate’s JCR Help, “Journal Profile”, read 16 October 2026.

The last two editions

Edition	Released	Journals	Categories	Countries/regions	First-time JIF
2025	18 June 2025	22,249	254	111	618
2026	17 June 2026	22,643	254	113	521

Each edition uses the previous calendar year’s citation data. Of the 521 first-time recipients in 2026, 58% are based outside the US and Western Europe (Clarivate).

What changed recently

2023: every Web of Science Core Collection journal gets a JIF

Announced on 26 July 2022: from the 2023 release, journals in the Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI) and the Arts & Humanities Citation Index (AHCI) receive a JIF, not only SCIE and SSCI titles — more than 9,000 additional journals. In 2023 those journals were shown without a rank or quartile. ESCI, SCIE, SSCI and AHCI explained.

2023: one decimal place

JIF, JIF without self-cites, 5-Year JIF and Immediacy Index are displayed to one decimal place; values that would round to zero show as “<0.1”.

2025: retracted content excluded from the numerator

From the June 2025 release, citations to and from retracted items no longer count towards the JIF numerator; retracted items still count in the denominator. In the 2024 data this affected about 20,000 of more than 4.6 million citations (about 0.4%).

Suppressed titles

Clarivate withholds a JIF for a year when a journal’s self-citation is an outlier in its category or when it is part of citation stacking between journals. A suppressed journal stays indexed in Web of Science but gets no JIF or rank in that edition; new journals and journals in the lowest quartile are exempt. Why journals get suppressed.

How to get access

JCR is reached through Clarivate’s product login, usually provided by a university library. Without access, Clarivate’s own advice is to use the free Master Journal List to confirm a journal is indexed, and to make sure any Impact Factor a journal advertises links to the real score.

Clarivate’s journal-matching tool, Manuscript Match, now sits inside JCR: paste a title and abstract and it suggests 2–10 Web of Science journals with JIF, rank and quartile. Its help page (updated 9 July 2026) says full functionality requires a JCR subscription.

JournalFees does not republish JIF values: they are Clarivate’s data. On each journal fee page we publish what we can verify ourselves — the list price, what authors actually paid and the peer review details the journal declares.

Questions