Clarivate will implement significant changes to its Journal Impact Factor (JIF) rankings in the June 2024 Journal Citation Reports (JCR), moving to unified rankings for each of its 229 science and social science categories. The company will also discontinue separate JIF rankings for the nine subject categories indexed in multiple editions and will not introduce JIF rankings for arts and humanities categories.
The shift to unified rankings means that categories such as Psychiatry, currently ranked separately in the Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE) and the Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI), will have a single ranking that includes journals from SCIE, SSCI, and the Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI). This change aims to provide a simpler and more complete view of journal performance within each category.
Clarivate explained that ESCI journals typically have lower JIFs than those in SCIE, SSCI, or the Arts and Humanities Citation Index (AHCI) because entry into the latter indexes requires passing four additional impact criteria on top of 24 quality criteria. However, some ESCI journals have higher JIFs than their counterparts in other indexes. The company noted that it paused impact evaluations in 2022 to focus on quality evaluations, a decision that supported the inclusion of ESCI journals in the unified rankings.
In a separate decision, Clarivate will not introduce JIF rankings for the 25 unique arts and humanities categories. The company had intended to add these rankings this year but reversed course after extensive data analysis and consultations with the scholarly community. According to Clarivate, citations in the arts and humanities are far lower and slower than in the sciences or social sciences. Modeling revealed that JIF rankings for these categories would produce multiple large ties in rank, leading to skewed quartile distributions and even entire quartiles missing from a category. Stakeholders agreed that such rankings would be difficult to interpret and of questionable value.
The changes build on previous efforts to enhance transparency and inclusivity in the JCR. In 2021, Clarivate introduced the Journal Citation Indicator (JCI), a field-normalized metric that allows comparison across disciplines, including the arts and humanities. In 2023, the company extended the JIF to AHCI and ESCI journals, bringing more than 9,000 journals from over 3,000 publishers into the JIF system. It also changed the display of the JIF from three decimal places to one, creating more ties in rankings to encourage the use of additional indicators alongside the JIF.
Clarivate stated that these changes reflect its commitment to safeguarding the integrity of the scholarly record amid a rise in fraudulent behaviors. The company aims to provide indicators of trustworthiness at the journal level, evolving the JIF from a pure measure of scholarly impact to one that also signals trustworthiness across all disciplines. The 2024 JCR release will mark the first time unified rankings are implemented, affecting how journals in science and social science categories are compared.
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