16 February 2024
Excerpted from the Clarivate blog post
We will move from edition-specific category JIF rankings to unified rankings for each of our 229 science and social science categories.
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.
Additionally, the new unified rankings will include journals indexed in ESCI. Using Psychiatry once again as our example – we will display a single Psychiatry ranking that includes journals indexed in SCIE, SSCI and ESCI.
The creation of combined category rankings will provide a simpler and more complete category view for the evaluation of journal performance.
Typically, ESCI journals have lower JIFs than SCIE, SSCI or AHCI journals in the same category. This is because entry into SCIE, SSCI and AHCI requires an additional step; a journal needs to pass our four impact criteria – designed to select journals with the highest scholarly impact – in addition to the 24 quality criteria that select for editorial rigor and best publishing practice.
However, we know there are some ESCI journals with a higher JIF than SCIE, SSCI or AHCI journals in the same category. There are a couple of reasons for this. Firstly, the differentiator between ESCI and SCIE/SSCI/AHCI isn’t just a journal’s JIF at a given moment in time – it is dependent on whether a journal passes our four impact criteria. Secondly, we have paused impact evaluations since 2022 to focus our efforts on quality evaluations of submitted and indexed journals.
This was an informed and deliberate decision driven by the increased effort needed to keep Web of Science free of compromised content and supported by the fact that ESCI journals now also have a JIF and from June will be included in the existing science and social science JIF category rankings.
We will not introduce JIF rankings for the arts and humanities categories
It was our intention to also introduce rankings for the 25 unique arts and humanities-specific categories this year. However, we have re-evaluated this decision following extensive data analysis and consultations with the scholarly community.
There is considerable variance in average citation speed and volume between disciplines. In general, citations in the arts and humanities are far lower and slower than citations in the sciences or social sciences.
In-depth modeling of JCR data revealed that introducing JIF rankings for the arts and humanities categories would create multiple, very large ties in rank. This in turn would create very skewed quartile distributions, including instances where certain quartiles would be entirely absent from a category.
We shared our findings with a variety of stakeholders from across the scholarly community and found consensus that the introduction of JIF rankings for our 25 unique arts and humanities-specific categories would be difficult to interpret and of questionable value. The most appropriate way to compare and rank journals in the arts and humanities categories is through the JCI and JCI rankings introduced in 2021.
We remain deeply committed to providing trustworthy data and responsible metrics and therefore have made the decision not to introduce JIF rankings for the arts and humanities categories in this year’s JCR release.