Journal impact factors: Frontiers at the top of citation and impact metrics

2017 journal impact factors: Frontiers at the top of citation and impact metrics

Frontiers journals lead in citations & rank in the top Impact Factor and CiteScore percentiles

Frontiers journals rank among the world’s most-cited in their fields — including top most-cited in neurosciences, microbiology, plant science and psychology. In total, Frontiers articles have received more than 700,000 citations to date.

Our journals also have some of the highest citation rates. Among the world’s 20 largest publishers in 2017, Frontiers ranks 4th most-cited with an average of 3.65 citations per article.

Moreover, within each academic category our journals rank in the top Impact Factor and CiteScore percentiles.

Furthermore, Frontiers articles are highly visible at a global scale. To date, Frontiers articles have been viewed and downloaded more than 420 million times from research and innovation hubs around the world and mentioned 620,000 times in the news and social media.

All of this is only possible with a stellar editorial board of 80,000 researchers, our diligent and committed Associate and Review Editors, the dedicated Frontiers Journal Development Teams — and the amazing research of the 300,000 authors who have published in our journals, most of whom come from the world’s top 300 universities.

A heartfelt congratulations and thank you to everyone!

The world’s most-cited journals

Frontiers journals rank among the world’s most influential in terms of citations, as reported in the 2017 Journal Citation Reports (JCR; 2018, Clarivate Analytics, formerly Thomson Reuters) and 2017 CiteScore edition (2018, Scopus, Elsevier).

Notably:

Scientific journal ranking: Frontiers journals top citations in 2017 JCR and Citescore (Scopus) categories

Figure 1: Academic categories in which Frontiers journals rank in the top 3 in terms of total citations. Journal Citation Reports 2017 (JCR-2017) categories: Citation rankings based on total number of citations received in 2017 to articles published in 2015 and 2016 in the JCR-2017 (2018, Clarivate Analytics). Full data is shown in Figure 9. Citescore 2017 categories: Citation rankings based on total number of citations received in 2017 to articles published in 2014, 2015 and 2016 per academic category in the 2017 CiteScore edition (2018, Scopus, Elsevier), as well as for the Neuroscience subject area. Full data is shown in Figure 10. *Neurosciences: The ranking is calculated from total citations for all journals in the Frontiers in Neuroscience journal series, in the Neurosciences category (JCR-2017) and subject area (CiteScore 2017 edition). The Frontiers in Neuroscience journal series includes all Frontiers journals in the field of Neuroscience.

<p>Figure 2: Frontiers articles have received more than 700,000 citations to date. Source: Scopus</p>

Figure 2: As of June 2018, Frontiers articles have received more than 700,000 citations (Scopus).


**Jump to:** What is journal impact? Journal citation analyses


Top citation rates

Articles published in Frontiers journals receive an average of 3.65 citations — the 4th-highest average citation rate among the world’s 20 largest academic journal publishers (Figure 3).

Science journal ranking: Analysis of the world’s 20 largest publishers by volume, ranked by number of average citations received to articles published in 2015, 2016 and 2017 (Scimago, 2018). Frontiers ranks 4th most-cited with an average of 3.65 citations per article.

Figure 3: Analysis of the world’s 20 largest publishers by volume, ranked by number of average citations received to articles published in 2015, 2016 and 2017 (Scimago, 2018). Frontiers ranks 4th most-cited with an average of 3.65 citations per article. Read the full analysis here.

Our journals also rank in the top Impact Factor and CiteScore percentiles in their scientific fields. Of the 26 Frontiers journals indexed with an Impact Factor (JCR-2017, Clarivate Analytics 2018), 21 rank in the top 30% most impactful journals. Overall, our journals rank at the 72nd Impact Factor percentile on average and as high as the 91st percentile.

2017 Impact Factor academic journal rankings - Frontiers journals

Figure 4: Analysis of Impact Factor rankings. A total of 11,655 journals are indexed in the 2017-JCR (released in 2018 by Clarivate Analytics). Of the 26 Frontiers journals listed in 23 JCR categories, 21 rank in the top 30% most impactful journals. Overall, Frontiers journals rank at the 72nd Impact Factor percentile on average and reach as high as the 91st percentile.

Similarly, of the 34 Frontiers journals with a 2017 CiteScore (Scopus, 2018), nine rank in the top 10% most impactful journals. Overall, our journals rank at the 84th CiteScore percentile on average and as high as the 95th percentile.

2017 CiteScore (Scopus, Elsevier) - science journal rankings - Frontiers

Figure 5: Analysis of CiteScore rankings. A total of 25,322 journals are indexed in the CiteScore 2017 edition (Scopus, 2018). The analysis here includes only the 22,472 journals with a full three-year publication history, that is, with published articles in 2015, 2016 and 2017. Of the 34 such Frontiers journals listed in 54 CiteScore categories, 9 rank in the top 10% most impactful journals. Overall, Frontiers journals rank at the 84th CiteScore percentile on average and as high as the 95th CiteScore percentile.


**Jump to:**► What are Impact Factor and CiteScore? Impact Factor & CiteScore for Frontiers journals


Highly visible at a global scale

The quality and impact of research published in Frontiers journals is further indicated by continued growth in the number of articles published — with 64% from the world’s top 300 institutions.

These articles show broad readership both within and outside academic circles, with hundreds of millions of views and downloads from around the world and wide coverage in the media.

Frontiers figures for authors, published articles and editors

Figure 6: Data to June 2018 (Frontiers).

Frontiers article impact - article views and downloads

Figure 7: Data to June 2018 (Frontiers).

Frontiers article impact - news and social media mentions

Figure 8: Data to June 2018 (altmetic.com).

What is journal impact?

Journal impact is traditionally measured via the number of citations received by the articles published within the journal. Journal Impact Factor and CiteScore are two indicators of journal quality while the influence of a journal on a field can be gauged by how much research is built on the papers published in the journal, as measured by the total number of citations.

What are article and author impact?

Frontiers additionally provides a wide array of real-time impact metrics that measure the overall performance and reach of articles and authors in an objective and crowd-sourced way. These include views and downloads, citations, social buzz (news and social media mentions, through altmetrics.com data) and visitor demographics like location, seniority and field of interest.

As opposed to journal metrics, article- and author-level metrics indicate the quality and global impact of individual articles, give credit to individual authors and allow article- and author-level comparisons.

What is the Impact Factor and CiteScore?

The Impact Factor is the average number of citations received in the last year to articles published in a journal for the previous two years. It is measured each year by Clarivate Analytics (formerly known as Thomson Reuters) and reported in the Journal Citation Reports (JCR). The 2017-JCR analysis is based on citations in 2017 to articles published in 2015 and 2016.

CiteScore is a similar metric covering titles in Elsevier’s Scopus database. The CiteScore number represents the average citations received in a specific year to articles published in the previous three years. The CiteScore 2017 edition is therefore based on citations in 2017 to articles published in 2014, 2015 and 2016. CiteScore was launched in December 2016 and is released once a year.


See Impact Factor & CiteScore for Frontiers journals


Journal citation analysis

Both the Journal Citation Reports and CiteScore metrics list citations — and our analysis of these figures shows that Frontiers journals rank among the most influential in their academic fields in terms of total citations.

JCR 2017 academic journal ranking - Frontiers citations

Figure 9: Analysis of the top 10 most-cited journals in several JCR categories (JCR-2017, released in 2018 by Clarivate Analytics). Bar plots show the total number of citations in 2017 to articles published in 2015 and 2016, with Frontiers journals in red. Neurosciences: The ranking is calculated from total citations for all journals in the Frontiers in Neuroscience journal series, in the Neurosciences category (JCR-2017). The Frontiers in Neuroscience journal series includes all Frontiers journals in the field of Neuroscience.

2017 CiteScore academic journal ranking report - citations by category - Frontiers

Figure 10: Analysis of the top 10 most-cited journals in several 2017 CiteScore categories (released in 2018 by Scopus, Elsevier). Bar plots show the total number of citations in 2017 to articles published in 2014, 2015 and 2016, with Frontiers journals in red. Neurosciences: The ranking is calculated from total citations for all journals in the Frontiers in Neuroscience journal series, in the Neuroscience subject area (CiteScore 2017 edition). The Frontiers in Neuroscience journal series includes all Frontiers journals in the field of Neuroscience.

2018 Impact Factor and CiteScore by journal

Journal

2018 CiteScore

2018 Impact Factor

Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience

read full analysis

3.96

3.582

Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience

read full analysis

3.43

3.138

Frontiers in Bioengineering and Biotechnology

4.36

Frontiers in Cellular and Infection Microbiology

read full analysis

3.97

3.520

Frontiers in Cellular Neuroscience

read full analysis

4.45

4.300

Frontiers in Chemistry

4.36

4.155

Frontiers in Computational Neuroscience

read full analysis

2.12

2.073

Frontiers in Earth Science

2.66

Frontiers in Endocrinology

read full analysis

4.00

3.519

Frontiers in Energy Research

 

3.98

Frontiers in Genetics

read full analysis

3.78

4.151

Frontiers in Human Neuroscience

read full analysis

3.04

2.871

Frontiers in Immunology

read full analysis

5.62

5.511

Frontiers in Integrative Neuroscience

read full analysis

3.23

Frontiers in Materials

 –

read full analysis

2.008

Frontiers in Marine Science

2.89

Frontiers in Microbiology

read full analysis

4.19

4.019

Frontiers in Molecular Biosciences

3.32

Frontiers in Molecular Neuroscience

read full analysis

4.34

3.902

Frontiers in Neural Circuits

read full analysis

3.36

3.131

Frontiers in Neuroanatomy

read full analysis

3.33

3.152

Frontiers in Neuroinformatics

 –

read full analysis

4.15

3.074

Frontiers in Neurology

read full analysis

3.28

3.508

Frontiers in Neurorobotics

 –

read full analysis

3.17

2.606

Frontiers in Neuroscience

read full analysis

3.94

3.877

Frontiers in Oncology

read full analysis

4.45

4.416

Frontiers in Pediatrics

read full analysis

 —

2.335

Frontiers in Pharmacology

read full analysis

3.95

3.831

Frontiers in Physiology

 –

read full analysis

3.66

3.394

Frontiers in Plant Science

 –

read full analysis

4.14

3.677

Frontiers in Psychiatry

read full analysis

3.14

2.857

Frontiers in Psychology

 –

read full analysis

2.21

2.089

Frontiers in Public Health

1.77

Frontiers in Synaptic Neuroscience

 –

read full analysis

3.31

Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience

read full analysis

3.79

Frontiers in Veterinary Science

1.94