Clarivate Plc, a global leader in providing trusted information and insights to accelerate the pace of innovation, has released the 2022 update to its annual Journal Citation Reports (JCR)™. The annual JCR release enables the research community to evaluate the world's high-quality academic journals using a range of indicators, descriptive data, and visualisations. Academic publishers use the reports to understand the scholarly impact of their journals in their field and promote them to the research community.
The JCR is based on 2021 data compiled from the Web of Science Core Collection™, the leading collection of quality journals, books, and conference proceedings in the world's largest publisher-neutral global citation database. Publications are evaluated by a global team of in-house editors at Clarivate using rigorous selection criteria. The data from the selected content are then carefully curated to ensure accuracy in the JCR metrics, together with a wide body of descriptive data. These insights enable researchers, publishers, editors, librarians, and funders to explore the key drivers of a journal's value for diverse audiences.
This year's release sees continued notable increases in citation impact for journals in general medicine, critical care, public health, infectious diseases, immunology, and basic biomedical sciences.
To support objectivity in journal selection and the integrity of the reports, Clarivate has suppressed three journals from the JCR (without presumption or accusation of wrongdoing), representing 0.01% of the journals listed. Clarivate monitors and excludes journals that demonstrate anomalous citation behaviour, including where there is evidence of excessive journal self-citation and/or citation stacking. The methodology and parameters for the effect of journal self-citation on JCR metrics were updated in 2020 to better account for discipline norms. The suppression of a journal from the JCR does not equate to a de-listing from the Web of Science Core Collection.
In addition, this year, the editorial integrity team at Clarivate identified a new type of anomalous citation behaviour: self-stacking. This is where the journal contains one or more documents with citations that are highly concentrated to the JIF numerator of the title itself. This is the first year Clarivate has formally defined the criteria for self-stacking suppression. They decided to issue a warning to six journals rather than suppress the journal's JIF. Going forward, continued journal self-stacking would result in the suppression of JIF.
Clarivate continuously reviews content to develop additional screening for distortions of the JIF.
The Journal Citation Reports contains more than 21,000 journals from 254 research categories and 114 countries. This includes: 12,800 science journals; 6,600 social science journals; 3,000 arts and humanities journals; Almost 13,000 journals have at least one gold open access publication; More than 5,300 journals publish all of their content via open access; and 192 journals received a Journal Impact Factor for the first time.
Each journal profile in the JCR provides a rich array of journal intelligence metrics and allows users to filter by category and rank. These include The Journal Citation Indicator, which represents the average category-normalised citation impact for papers published in the prior three-year period. All journals in the JCR are eligible to receive this metric as of 2021; The Immediacy Index, which measures how frequently the journal’s content is cited within the same year as publication; The journal's rank in the category, determined by Journal Impact Factor, expressed as a percentile; Cited half-life, which is the median age, in years, of items in the journal that were cited during the JCR year; and the Journal Impact Factor, which is given to journals in SCIE and SSCI, and which scales the citations received to recent content by a measure of the size of the journal’s scholarly output.
In addition, the Journal Citation Reports include descriptive data such as open access content, top contributing institutions, and regions.
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