Clarivate's Announced Changes Mean Improved Assessment of MDPI's Journals

In July, Clarivate announced its upcoming plan to expand the collection of journals that will now receive a journal Impact Factor (IF). Previously, although all journals indexed in Web of Science were given variable citation metrics within Clarivate’s yearly Journal Citation Reports (JCR), only journals indexed within either the Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE) or Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI) received IFs. This will now change starting in June 2023, when all journals indexed within the Core Collection of Web of Science will receive an IF, including the Arts and Humanities Citation Index (AHCI) and the Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI).

As the largest open access publisher in the world with over 210 journals indexed in the Web of Science Core Collection, we welcome the announced changes! These changes will provide scholars with more data to better compare and assess the quality, impact and reputation of academic journals. Additionally, MDPI fully supports the mission behind these changes to better “level the playing field for all quality journals, including recently-launched journals [and] open access journals”. *

For us, this means that at least 113 additional MDPI journals will receive an Impact Factor in the June 2023 JCR, adding to the 98 MDPI journals that already have an Impact Factor.

Meanwhile, MDPI continues to support and encourage all academic journal ranking lists that provide authors with alternative metrics. We also provide various journal data on our journal statistics pages and on article pages, in order to promote our mission to continuously offer transparency around journal and article metrics and better support the needs of our authors and the academic community.

*According to “Announcing changes to the 2023 Journal Citation Reports” by Clarivate.