Do journals in AHCI and ESCI journals have a Journal Impact Factor?

20,942

Total journals

(2021 Journal Citation Reports)

From the 2021 release, JCR also include the world’s leading journals in the arts and humanities.

https://clarivate.com/webofsciencegroup/web-of-science-journal-citation-reports-2021-infographic/

This is in contrast to JCR 2020 which contained a total of 12,171 journals, of which 9,370 are Science journals,  3,486 are Social Science journals, and 1,658 are Gold Open Access journals whereas 7,487 are Hybrid journals.

https://www.facebook.com/webofscience/posts/web-of-science-journal-citation-reports-2020-are-here-the-just-released-update-i/3666999133317541/

https://twitter.com/clarivate/status/1277593244952596480

The first of these enhancements will expand the JCR’s coverage of journal literature to reflect the full breadth of research covered in all the journals in the Web of Science Core Collection™. Although our JCR metrics already include citations recorded in journals covered in the Arts & Humanities Citation Index (AHCI)™ and the Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI)™, those two indexes and their journal content have not been fully covered in JCR – until now.

In addition to rounding out the JCR’s journal coverage, the inclusion of all material from AHCI and ESCI represents a unification of content and policies across the Web of Science, InCites Benchmarking & Analytics™ and JCR – putting everything on a common path. 

AHCI and ESCI journals will not be awarded a Journal Impact Factor

The journals covered in AHCI and ESCI have met the same rigorous quality criteria, applied by our expert in-house Web of Science editors, for coverage as the publications covered in the Science Citation Index™ and the Social Sciences Citation Index™. Therefore, AHCI and ESCI – and their content from trustworthy, Web of Science-selected journals – merit complete coverage in the JCR.

Along with the news about the addition of AHCI and ESCI content to JCR, we must report that journals from these indexes will not receive a Journal Impact Factor (JIF)™ in the JCR.

The reason for this is the JIF calculation is only applied to the most impactful or significant journals within the sciences and social sciences – that is, those that have met our selection criteria for both quality and impact and are indexed in Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE)™ and/or Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI)™. Specifically, the four impact criteria (comparative citation analysis; author citation analysis; editorial board citation analysis; and content significance) are designed to select the most influential journals in their respective fields, using journal-level citation activity as the primary indicator of impact.

In terms of a potential JIF for AHCI journals, the criteria above do not precisely apply, because citation behavior and dynamics in the arts and humanities are distinctly different from other main research fields. As the AHCI product page points out, “Compared to the clinical, natural and social sciences, the arts & humanities may differ significantly regarding the type of content that is considered to be of scholarly importance, norms for reviewing content, and citation behavior.”

Therefore, although the Web of Science editors apply the same impact criteria to all our journal collections, the selection process places less emphasis on journal-level citation activity in the arts and humanities. This is why AHCI journals have never received a JIF.

As for the journals covered in ESCI: Although they have demonstrated the high levels of editorial rigor and publishing best practice required to pass our 24 quality criteria, these journals do not meet our four impact criteria. Thus, we do not calculate a JIF for ESCI journals.

As part of our collection curation process, we monitor all ESCI journals and those that develop sufficiently high levels of journal-level citation activity are re-evaluated for inclusion in SCIE, SSCI and/or AHCI.

https://clarivate.com/blog/the-road-to-journal-citation-reports-2021-new-content-and-a-new-metric/

Journal Citation Reports: Reasons for not calculating Impact Factors for journals covered in Arts & Humanities Citation Index

Journals unique to the Arts & Humanities Citation Index will not appear in Journal Citation Reports as this is an area where a large amount of work is done in books rather than in journals. Journals in Arts & Humanities Citation Index with overlap into Science Citation Index Expanded and/or Social Sciences Citation Index will be in Journal Citation Reports.  

The primary reason that there is no Journal Citation Reports edition for Arts & Humanities is because the key metric used in Journal Citation Reports, the Journal Impact Factor, is not an appropriate measure for Arts & Humanities publications. 

Journal Citation Reports is a report of journal-to-journal citation metrics based on a single citing year of data and incorporating two or five years of prior years' data into a set of performance metrics. In the Arts & Humanities, the whole profile of literature use is different - both in type and in time. 

Type: Arts & Humanities depends less exclusively on journal communications than Social Sciences. Social Sciences, in turn, depend less heavily on journal literature than Science. The publication of books and the citations in and to these books are a critical part of how scholarly communication takes place in Arts & Humanities. To exclude books, citations in books, and citations to books from a performance metric in Arts & Humanities would under-represent the network of scholarly communications in these fields.                 

Time: Arts & Humanities citations span far more than two or five years - the two time frames used in Journal Impact Factor calculation. Scholarship on a subject can go through long phases of non-recognition - until some new scholar picks up a subject and re-invigorates it. 

The net result is that Arts & Humanities journals will have, on the whole, very low Journal Impact Factors – and very low 5-Year Journal Impact Factors. Even a 10-year Journal Impact Factor will be very low for these materials. A Journal Impact Factor, by all its current definitions, is not the proper way to assess Arts & Humanities publishing. As the metrics offerings and Clarivate Analytics expand, we'll have more data and analyses to bring to bear on the question of performance assessment in Arts & Humanities.

https://support.clarivate.com/ScientificandAcademicResearch/s/article/Journal-Citation-Reports-Reasons-for-not-calculating-Impact-Factors-for-journals-covered-in-Arts-Humanities-Citation-Index

The answer: No