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for ranking academic journals analysing citations they received and the impact they created in the
scientific communities.

JIF is a crucial parameter in the realm of Bibliometric analyses, which has brought revolution in the
way the journals are ranked. Specifically, suppose we are considering the IF of a particular journal for
the year 2019, then we have to consider all the papers (articles and reviews) published in that journal
for the two preceding calendar years, that is 2017 and 2018. The WoS database is used to find all the
citations in all the journals in 2019 to the papers published in that journal for the years 2017 and 2018.
The Impact Factor of that Journal for 2019 is obtained by dividing the citations received to the papers
published. To put it quantitatively:

Impact Factor of a given Journal for the year 2019:

Number of papers published in the journal in the years 2017 and 2018 = A
Number of all the citations received by these published papers in the year 2019 = B
Impact Factor = A/B

The number of years for which citations are chosen is arbitrary; similarly, the number of years for
which the publications are considered is arbitrary; therefore, by changing the value X and Y we can
get different factors. An Impact Factor of 2.0 means that, on an average, the articles published one or
two year prior have been cited twice in the current year. Informed and careful use of these impact data
is essential. Users may be tempted to jump to ill-formed conclusions based on Impact Factor statistics
unless several caveats are considered.

Each edition of JCR contains the previous year’s publication data and shows the relationship between
citing and cited journals in an easily comprehensible manner. This means 2019 JCR provides
analytics, including JIF, from 2018 Web of Science Data, more precisely from the Web of Science Core
Collection across more than 250 disciplines. As of 2019, this database contains nearly 23,000 journals
however only 12,600 of these have Impact Factors. These journals are the 9,200 indexed in the Science
Citation Index Expanded (SCIE), and the 3,400 indexed in the Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI).
The other two databases of journals, Arts & Humanities Citation Index (AHCI) containing 1,800
journals, and the Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI) containing 8,600 journals, are not given
Impact Factors. The JCR analytical works start in March of the JCR year and results are made official
in June. It is updated annually. Journals that are accepted into SCIE and/or SSCI before January 1, and
that remain covered in one of these collections when JCR production is started in March, are eligible
to appear in the June release of the JCR data and receive a JIF.

Clarivate Analytics claims to use a single set of 28 criteria to evaluate journals, divided into 24 quality
criteria designed to select for editorial rigour and best practice at the journal level, and four “impact
criteria” designed to select the most influential journals in their respective fields based on citation activity as
the primary indicator. Journals that satisfy quality criteria related to journal practices are sometimes unable
to satisfy the four impact criteria. These are however, included in ESCI. Research journals are constantly
scrutinized for their performance and if they do not come up to expectations, they are excluded . It is a
two-step process: first, the Journals move to ESCI; and second, upon further clearing the IF- related criteria
they move to SCIE, SSCI, or AHCI, depending on the subject area. This is a dynamic process, which allows
Clarivate to include or exclude journals for assigning impact factors. For new journals, apart from getting
indexed in the WoS, the first step to receiving an IF is to feature in the ESCI.

The IF is useful in clarifying the significance of citation frequencies. It eliminates some of the biases
of such counts, which favour large journals over small ones, or frequently-issued journals over less-

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