New Journal Impact Scores

2021 UAR Two-Year Journal Impact Factor Released in June 2022 is 2.387.

This is a decline from 2020’s score of 3.032, our first yearly decline since 2013. This is not due to a decline in citations, but from a change in how Clarivate Analytics calculates its two-year impact factor. About half of SAGE’s journals had decreased impact factors this year.

Ian Balisy, UAR’s editor at SAGE, provided this explanation of the change and its impact on the 2021 scores: The 2021 Impact Factor (published in June 2022) prioritizes the online publication date for the citing article data (numerator) as well as half the denominator data (2020 citable items). This means that journals that published a long backlog of ahead of print articles in 2020 will likely see disproportionate decrease in their IFs this year.  

He notes that in UAR’s case, both the citations and citable items increased, but because Clarivate had already prioritized the OnlineFirst publication date for the citations (numerator), which accounted for part of the increase last year, the increase in the citable items (denominator) this year was larger. You can see this in the large increase in citable items this year--the 2019 numbers stayed just the articles published in issues but 2020 was both those published in issues and any published OnlineFirst in 2020.