Enable confident decision-making
Publisher-neutral journal intelligence
What is Journal Citation Reports?
For almost half a century publishers, institutions, funders and researchers have trusted the impartial data provided by Journal Citation Reports™ (JCR™) to identify the world’s leading journals.
Evaluate journals for your collections with a multidimensional view of a journal’s impact and influence. View citation metrics, including the Journal Impact Factor™ (JIF™) and Journal Citation Indicator™, alongside descriptive open access statistics and contributor information.
We identify the world’s leading journals, and Journal Citation Reports provides you with the publisher-neutral journal intelligence you need to determine journal quality and conduct meaningful comparisons. The trustworthy, reliable data in our journal profiles provide you with a number of meaningful metrics, descriptive data and compelling visualizations to help you make confident decisions in today’s evolving scholarly publishing landscape.
Using the transparent data and metrics in JCR profiles, you can:
Find journals consistent with your values to showcase your research.
Ensure your library collections support rigorous research and teaching.
Make data driven decisions about your open access strategy.
Data-driven collection development
With 30,000+ scholarly journals published globally, it’s more challenging than ever to assess journals. Journal Citation Reports is built on a reliable, curated foundation so you can quickly understand key trends within and among journals.
Objectivity
JCR provides unbiased, publisher-neutral information which does not promote or endorse any specific publishers.
Reliability
Our teams meticulously and consistently index the publication and citation data underpinning JCR metrics and visualizations.
Selectivity
Only journals that have met the rigorous quality standards in the Web of Science Core CollectionTM editorial selection process receive JCR metrics.
Transparency
In addition to granular, linked data to help you thoroughly understand a journal’s performance and relationships to other publications, we provide an easy way to stay current on Web of Science journal coverage changes on our Master Journal List.
Unpack what lies beneath our leading indicators and place them in a wider context
When assessing the usefulness of a journal, go beyond single point metrics and leverage multidimensional profiles for your analysis and decision-making. With JCR, you can easily uncover key citation impact trends across 250+ disciplines to inform your strategies. Explore a rich array of leading indicators, descriptive data and compelling visualizations to quickly understand a journal’s role within – and influence upon – the global research community. To conduct a well-rounded assessment, consider pairing several metrics together, e.g., Journal Impact Factor, Journal Citation Indicator, Article Citation Median, Immediacy Index, and more.
These learning resources will help you understand the indicators included in Journal Citation Reports so that you can responsibly and confidently incorporate them in your analyses.
Connecting JCR metrics for broader use
Journal Citation Reports is integrated with the Web of Science to help you quickly view high level JCR metrics for a title within your Web of Science search results. Journal overlays provide a simple overview of a title’s impact and influence in its field as well as links to full JCR profiles help you take a deeper dive into a journal’s role in the network of scholarly communication.

JCR metrics are connected and viewable within the ProQuest Platform so users can reference the Journal Citation Indicator and Journal Impact Factor of a title for confident decision-making during the point of need for teaching, learning, and research. Link directly to JCR profiles to gain a robust view of a journal’s performance, audience, and relationships with other journals.

The Journal Citation Indicator is embedded into the collection management workflow in the Alma platform. Gather insights into normalized journal citation performance while reviewing your holdings, then link directly from Alma to the multi-dimensional profiles in JCR for additional metrics.