Image Credit: Jordan McDonald on Unsplash
Image Credit: Jordan McDonald on Unsplash

Every scholarly journal aims to contribute to the advancement of its field and make a measurable impact.

Traditionally, publishers and editorial teams have prioritized bibliometric impact indicators — mainly focusing on the Journal Impact Factor, a scientometric index calculated by Clarivate that reflects the average number of citations a journal receives for its articles, typically calculated at two-year intervals (though sometimes at five-year intervals).

For developing publications, obtaining and growing a Journal Impact Factor is often somewhat of an elusive target. How do you get a Journal Impact Factor (JIF)? What steps can you take to increase your JIF once you do? And the big question — when it comes to demonstrating journal impact, is it really all about the JIF?

Spoiler: No, there is so much more.

In this blog post guide, we cover answers to your burning questions about the JIF, a range of alternative impact indicators to consider, and how to grow your journal impact regardless of which measures you use. To jump to a particular section, click the quick links below. Let’s get to it!

  1. Obtaining a journal impact factor: process and timeline
  2. Beyond the JIF: alternative impact measures
  3. Steps to increase journal impact: whatever metrics you track
  4. Putting it all together

Obtaining a journal impact factor: process and timeline

If you’ve never obtained a JIF before, you’re likely wondering — where do I start?

Of course, the first step is consistently publishing high-quality articles that researchers are likely to reference. But what comes next once your publication is up and running and starting to accrue citations? In this section, we break down how to get a JIF.

Apply for inclusion in the Web of Science

The JIF is calculated by Clarivate, as noted, using data from its Web of Science Core Collection Journal Citation Indexes. So, to get a JIF, you’ll need to first apply to have your journal added to one of those indexes (all of which will make you eligible). The WoS indexes include the:

  • Emerging Sources Citation Index
  • Science Citation Index-Expanded
  • Social Sciences Citation Index
  • Arts & Humanities Citation Index

Getting your journal indexed in the WoS will also help improve its discoverability, increasing the likelihood of scholars finding, reading, and citing your articles. So, WoS indexing is also a step toward growing your journal impact factor once you obtain one (double win)!

Ok, how to apply to have your journal added to a WoS index? In short, you’ll need to ensure it meets all of their selection requirements. As explained on the WoS Core Collection journal evaluation page:

“We use a single set of 28 criteria to evaluate journals; these are divided into 24 quality criteria designed to select for editorial rigor and best practice at the journal level, and four impact criteria designed to select the most impactful journals in their respective fields using citation activity as the primary indicator of impact.”

Once you believe your journal fits the WoS criteria, you can apply for inclusion via its Publisher Portal. If the WoS assessment team determines that your journal meets its baseline quality requirements, they will admit it to the Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI). And, if your journal fulfills WoS’ additional impact criteria (at that point or any time in the future), it will enter one of the other flagship databases by subject area.

For a detailed guide to applying to WoS and answers to FAQs, check out this blog post.

How long does it take to get a Journal Impact Factor?

Once you apply to have your journal added to a WoS index, it generally takes about 3-6 months to receive a decision. If your journal isn’t admitted into WoS on the first try, which is likely since it only has a 10-12% average acceptance rate, you can always reapply later, as explained here.

If your journal is admitted into WoS, you’ll be eligible for a JIF. So when can you expect to see it?

In short, it takes about three years to get your first Journal Impact Factor because your JIF will be based on the number of citable items from the last calendar year and the two years of publication data before that.

For example, if a journal published 50 papers from 2022-2023 and those articles collectively accrued 10 citations in 2024, the 2024 Impact Factor of the journal — to be made available in summer 2025 — would be 0.2 (or the citations in year 3 to articles published in years 1 and 2 / number of articles published in years 1 and 2).

Beyond the JIF: alternative impact measures

While the JIF is a useful data point for assessing journal influence, it is far from a perfect metric (if there ever were such a thing!) and should not be considered the end-all-be-all for measuring a journal’s impact.

Why? To understand the challenges of relying solely on the JIF, it’s important to know a bit about its history.

Conceived by Dr. Eugene Garfield in 1955 and first introduced in 1975, the original intent of the JIF was to serve as a tool to help scholars find source journals and university librarians make more informed subscription decisions. However, the JIF soon became used (and arguably misconstrued) as a measure of journal prestige and even a way of demonstrating researchers’ impact in promotion, tenure, and funding proceedings despite Garfield repeatedly warning:

“This ambiguity often causes problems. It is one thing to use impact factors to compare journals and quite another to use them to compare authors.”

The conflation of the JIF with perceived journal quality and potential researcher impact by association has created a virtuous circle in many ways as authors continually compete to publish in the same high-impact journals, in some cases, instead of smaller titles with more specialist communities where their research might have more influence. These self-imposed limitations perpetuated by the JIF construct have become especially apparent in our digital world, where an article’s association with a particular journal is becoming less consequential to how people find it or choose to cite it.

While the JIF continues to be a leading impact measure, it doesn’t mean the cycle of JIF-based assessment has to continue. Publishers can help turn the research evaluation tides by promoting reform initiatives and embracing other quantitative and qualitative research evaluation measures (remember, the JIF is one of many available tools!).

The Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) is a prime example of an initiative born out of the academic community’s desire to change how research impact is measured. It’s about advancing more robust approaches to impact analysis that put data into context. Similar initiatives publishers and journals can look to for guidance include:

  • The Leiden Manifesto: a list of “ten principles to guide research evaluation.”
  • The SCOPE Framework: a five-stage model for responsible research evaluation.
  • HuMetricsHSS: an initiative that “creates and supports values-enacted frameworks for understanding and evaluating all aspects of the scholarly life well-lived.”
  • The Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment (CoARA): a group of organizations “committed to reforming the methods and processes by which research, researchers, and research organizations are evaluated.”

Other impact indicators to measure

So, what are other established and emerging means of communicating and measuring journal impact? We explore various alternative options you can consider below.

Alternative bibliometric or citation-based impact metrics:

  • Eigenfactor: An academic research project co-founded by Carl Bergstrom and Jevin West in 2007 that uses network analysis algorithms to evaluate the impact of journals and articles based on the impact of the journals that cite the research.
  • Relative Citation Ratio (RCR): From the National Institute of Health (NIH), this metric measures the scientific influence of individual articles by field.
  • Source Normalized Impact Per Paper (SNIP): A metric meant to account for the subject-specific differences in citation practices, powered by Scopus.
  • SCImago Journal Rank (SJR): A metric for measuring the scientific influence of scholarly journals powered by Scopus.
  • CiteScore: This is essentially Elsevier’s equivalent of the JIF, which looks at the last three years of publication data.
  • scite: A platform for discovering and evaluating scientific articles via Smart Citation badges. Smart Citations show not only how many times an article has been cited but also a breakdown of the number of citations that were “supporting,” “mentioning,” and “contradictory,” providing more nuanced insight.
  • Dimensions badges: Powered by the Dimensions database, which brings together information about funding, publications, policy, patents, and grants, Dimensions Badges provide a quick overview of a publication’s citation performance, including total citations, recent citations, Field Citation Ratio (FCR), and Relative Citation Ratio (RCR).

Altmetrics and other impact markers:

  • Altmetrics: These are metrics that measure how research is being discussed online via citations and various other means, such as mentions on social media platforms like Bluesky, in the mainstream media, and public policy documents, among other sources. Altmetrics help show how research resonates beyond academia, spotlighting how journals and individual articles/researchers are affecting the real world. Unlike bibliometric impact indicators, they can also apply to nontraditional scholarly outputs. Another key benefit of altmetrics is that they make it possible to show the impact of research long before it is cited, making them a value-add for authors on promotion and tenure timelines. Publishers can use services like Altmetric and OurResearch (formerly ImpactStory) that provide altmetric scores/badges to collect altmetrics data and display it on their article pages. (Note: If your journal uses the Scholastica OA Publishing Platform, you should know that we offer an Altmetric Badges integration.)
  • Article usage metrics: By this, we mean readership stats like HTML article page views, PDF article download counts, and demographic data like readers by country. These stats reflect the frequency and breadth of reader engagement with a journal, which is especially important for journals in applied fields or those aiming to reach practitioners and policymakers. You can track journal analytics to showcase readership numbers online (authors will appreciate this!) and better understand reader behavior to make more informed publication decisions. Bear in mind — if you have content hosted on aggregation platforms like EBSCO, preprints like Arxiv, or archives like PubMed Central, you’ll need to collate all those usage metrics to get a holistic picture. (Note: Scholastica OA Publishing Platform users can learn more about the publishing analytics it includes here.)
  • TOP Factor: Developed by the Center for Open Science (COS), Top Factor is a metric that assesses journals’ policies based on their adherence to the Transparency and Openness Promotion (TOP) Guidelines. TOP contains eight modular standards to improve research transparency and reproducibility with three levels of stringency.

Steps to increase journal impact: whatever metrics you track

Regardless of the impact measures you use, the first step to establishing and growing your journal impact is consistently publishing high-caliber content. That starts with posting transparent editorial policies and upholding your journal’s commitment to editorial rigor and research integrity — key factors for attracting a steady stream of quality submissions.

If your journal is newer, you may be thinking — ok, but how do I start getting initial submissions? Seeking well-known scholars to join your editorial board is a sure way to help build its reputation and attract quality papers. You can also commission well-known researchers to contribute editorials, commentaries, and other short pieces to draw in more scholars.

From there, what can you do to increase the chances of readers finding, sharing, and citing your journal articles to grow your impact? We break it down below.

Make rich content registration deposits

The next step to increasing the impact of any journal is ensuring researchers can easily find its content in related online searches. Getting your articles indexed in scholarly databases and optimizing them for search engines are both key to that, and we’ll cover those topics shortly. But first, there’s an even more fundamental area to consider — content registration.

Content registration services such as Crossref have evolved to serve as not only tools for creating persistent DOI links to articles but also platforms to expand their visibility and reach. For example, many scholars use Crossref’s Metadata Search functionality and DOI reference links to find articles, and various discovery and altmetrics tracking services like Dimensions, Kudos, and Altmetric rely on Crossref as one of their primary data sources. Additionally, many scholarly aggregation databases and indexes use Crossref metadata to enrich the content they ingest. So, making rich DOI metadata deposits can also improve your archiving and indexing outcomes as you add your journal to different A&I databases.

If your journal doesn’t have a DOI, you’ll need to start by obtaining one. Then, develop a plan to produce and submit quality machine-readable article metadata with DOI deposits. Remember to follow the 3 Cs — keep your metadata clean, correct, and complete! From there, work to enrich your metadata regularly per the latest standards. You can learn more about the benefits of machine-readable metadata here and the top rich metadata elements to focus on here. Additionally, we covered how to harness the many article discoverability benefits Crossref offers in this past webinar.

Quick note for Scholastica users: You should know that we auto-generate XML article-level metadata in line with the JATS standard for all journals using our peer review system, production service, and/or OA publishing platform. The Scholastica OA Publishing Platform also includes a Crossmark DOI registration integration option.

Focus on your indexing and SEO

From there, focus on adding your journal to relevant abstracting and indexing databases and optimizing your articles for search. Doing so will help you reach a wider audience, improve your article citation prospects, and gain access to different impact assessment tools provided by indexes and aggregators.

Starting with A&Is, you’ll want to apply to have your articles added to leading cross-disciplinary indexes like WoS, Scopus, and the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) for OA titles, as well aggregators like JSTOR and EBSCO as relevant, and discipline-specific databases (e.g., PubMed for biomedical and life science journals). Additionally, ensure your articles are eligible for inclusion in crawler-based academic search engines like Google Scholar.

We cover key journal indexing criteria, how to develop an achievable incremental indexing strategy, and tips for navigating indexing application processes in this blog post guide.

As you build out your journal indexing strategy, don’t forget to also think about search engine optimization or SEO. Essential SEO best practices for academic journals include:

  • Produce machine-readable XML metadata: producing XML metadata (and, going a step further, full-text XML articles will enable you to enrich your content registration and indexing deposits, as discussed. It’s also increasingly critical to improving content’s ranking prospects in AI-powered search tools and voice search as that becomes more common.
  • Publish HTML versions of articles (not just PDFs): HTML is more readily crawlable by search engines.
  • Ensure your journal website and article pages are mobile-friendly: mobile-friendliness is now a critical ranking factor for mainstream search engines like Google.
  • Link your article citations to the sources: this helps search engine crawlers determine how articles relate to other content online so they can more easily serve them up in search queries.
  • Add your published articles to a sitemap: this will make it easier for search engines to crawl your website.

For an in-depth guide to journal SEO, check out this blog post.

Prioritize article promotion

In addition to taking steps to ensure your journal articles are discoverable, promoting them is another way to increase their potential impact. Promotion can be done at the publisher level if you have dedicated marketing and communication support or by your editors if not. Either way, it’s a good idea to enlist your editors to help with promotion since they’ll likely have relevant outreach networks through their social media followings, disciplinary associations, and conferences they attend.

Regardless of who’s involved, developing a clear strategy will be essential to the success of your journal promotion efforts. Consider the current position of your publication in the market compared to competing titles and the target readers and authors you’re trying to reach. Then, work to hone your messaging (e.g., About and For Authors page content, etc.) to optimally communicate the unique value of your journal and identify promotion tactics likely to attract your desired audience. We cover tips for developing an effective and efficient journal promotion strategy (even with a small team!) here and highlight various digital promotion tactics journals are leveraging that you can use for inspiration here. Examples include:

  • Building up engaged social media communities
  • Publishing bite-sized supplementary content like author interviews
  • Sending segmented new article alert emails
  • Hosting scholar engagement events
  • Publishing timely special collections likely to attract attention

Since it probably won’t be feasible for you to do individual promotion for every article you publish, it’s also a good idea to explore ways to encourage authors to promote their articles, like sending authors of accepted papers an email with links to tips for increasing the impact of their work. You can even include example text for posting article announcements on social media or sending publicity emails to news outlets.

To increase the impact of your older but still relevant articles (and give the authors a renewed self-promotion opportunity!), you can also explore opportunities to resurface your past content. Examples include inviting commentaries on notable pieces and compiling collections of articles around trending topics.

As you try out different journal promotion strategies, it’s a good idea to establish some level of publishing analytics tracking to gather readership metrics. You can then use that data to analyze the performance of your current promotion efforts and make more informed future promotion plans.

Expand access to your research

Finally, even with the most comprehensive content registration, indexing, SEO, and promotion strategies, the potential impact of your journal articles will ultimately depend on how many people engage with them.

To make your articles available to as wide a readership as possible, consider making a portion or all of your journal’s content openly accessible. You could do this through a green, gold, or diamond OA route (see examples here). Recent studies suggest that OA articles are more widely read, cited, and shared online than their paywalled counterparts.

Journals that publish OA content can then emphasize the value of their open science contributions to attract more quality submissions, like highlighting their OA article usage stats (altmetrics can help here!) or publishing case studies about the broader impacts of OA articles.

Putting it all together

A journal’s impact is about more than just citations. As you work to establish and build out your journal impact, remember to pan out to the bigger picture. Go beyond the JIF and consider how else you can track and demonstrate the influence of your research. Ensure you are empowering your community to promote their work and that you’re making the best use of available readership data to drive your editorial strategy forward. Then, regularly consider where you can optimize to be more competitive.

By embracing diverse impact measures, you can tell a richer, more comprehensive story of your journal’s influence — one that resonates with authors, readers, and funders alike.

Tales from the Trenches