Clarivate Journal Citation Reports (JCR rating)

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https://clarivate.com/academia-government/scientific-and-academic-research/research-funding-analytics/journal-citation-reports/

Journal Citation Reports (JCR) is an analytical platform that provides bibliometric data for evaluating the world’s leading scholarly journals across science and social science disciplines. It utilizes citation data from the Web of Science Core Collection to generate standardized performance metrics, most notably the Journal Impact Factor (JIF) and the Journal Citation Indicator (JCI). The service allows users to:

Assess the relative influence of journals within specific academic categories.
Track longitudinal trends in citation impact and publication volume.
Identify high-quality open access venues and publisher-level performance data.

Note: this is one or the rare completely paid service we link in our directory. You will usually find the particular journal’s JCR rating in the journal itself.

Professionals in science, engineering, and innovation apply JCR metrics to drive strategic decision-making in research and development. Scientists and engineers use the data to identify high-prestige journals for manuscript submission, maximizing the visibility and authority of their technical output. In innovation and R&D environments, these tools are used to:

Identify influential research clusters to stay ahead of technological shifts.
Vet the quality of scientific literature used to support patent applications or product validation.
Benchmark institutional research performance against global peers to justify resource allocation and research investments.

Disciplines: Academic research, Bibliometrics, Library science, Scientific publishing, Research management.

Free alternative to SCImago SJR, Scopus CiteScore.

Clarivate Journal Citation Reports compared with SCImago SJR and Scopus CiteScore
Clarivate Journal Citation Reports (JCR)	SCImago SJR	Scopus CiteScore
Data source: JCR uses the Web of Science Core Collection. Article-level cited references are aggregated to journal level at year end, and journals must pass an editorial evaluation.	Data source: SJR is derived from Scopus. Its prestige-weighted calculation is applied to the Scopus citations.	Data source: CiteScore is calculated by Scopus itself and is published by Elsevier, so it shares its database with SJR.
Indicators and window: The Journal Impact Factor divides citations in the JCR year to the two previous years by the citable items (articles and reviews) of those years. The Journal Citation Indicator uses three years.	Indicators and window: SJR uses a three-year window and weights each citation by the prestige of the citing journal. It is computed with an iterative, PageRank-like algorithm.	Indicators and window: CiteScore is a ratio of citations to documents and is fixed once a year. A monthly CiteScore Tracker forecasts the upcoming value.
Field normalization: The Journal Citation Indicator is set to an average of 1.0 and compared within Clarivate subject categories (235 in total at its 2021 launch), so 2.5 means about two and a half times the average. The Impact Factor is not normalized.	Field normalization: Thematic closeness between citing and cited journals is considered in the weighting, a feature added in 2012 (SJR2).	Field normalization: CiteScore Percentile ranks a title within its subject field. It is computed from the number of titles with a lower score plus half of those tied, divided by the field total.
Coverage and access: Clarivate said it would give JCI scores to all Core Collection journals, including those without an impact factor. The dataset is largely closed to most users, per a 2021 Scholarly Kitchen analysis.	Coverage and access: SJR is described as a free journal metric. It also provides country-level indicators.	Coverage and access: CiteScore covers all serial titles, not only journals. Elsevier lists CiteScore, SNIP and SJR as free at scopus.com/sources.