Clarivate Discontinues IJERPH and JRFM Coverage in Web of Science (Update)

On 15 March 2023, we received note that Clarivate has discontinued coverage of IJERPH and JRFM in Web of Science as of 13 February 2023. Clarivate revealed that two MDPI journals failed the Content Relevance criterion, highlighting publications that were deemed outside the scope of the journal, and not to do with quality of the publications. On 31 March 2023, we formally appealed the decision to discontinue IJERPH in Web of Science.

Clarivate periodically evaluates journals indexed in their collections, and any journals that no longer meet their criteria are removed from coverage. Unfortunately, publishers are not informed about the evaluation process until its completion.

In response to the decision, we have taken several actions, including collecting feedback from editorial board members and chief editors and submitting an official appeal. We have now agreed to send over a set of questions and we'll set up a virtual meeting once Clarivate have discussed our queries.

We believe that the decision made by Clarivate in relation to IJERPH is unfair and wrongly assessed, and we included such information from our appeal process to support this claim.

Throughout this process, we have identified several aspects that have not been transparent on the part of Clarivate. These include the lack of warning, refusal to index content published before the communication of decision, and the fact that we have not been provided with data and detailed information on the evaluation process and output.

MDPI was only informed that IJERPH and JRFM were assessed. Clarivate's blog post from March 20 provides more information about their current re-evaluation process, stating that they have been assessing over 500 journals since the beginning of the year, with 50 already delisted. Both major commercial publishing houses and smaller or society publishers are affected.

Close to 90% of MDPI published content is going to be covered by the Web of Science Core Collection going forward. MDPI takes this opportunity to safeguard the editorial policies of our journals, and work closely with Web of Science to ensure that the stated scope of journals is being met.

We value Web of Science as a highly trusted citation database within the publishing industry and look forward to more than 200 MDPI journals receiving advanced citation metrics with Web of Science this coming June.

We remain committed to providing high-quality service to our authors and look forward to resolving this issue with Clarivate in a fair and transparent manner.

Finally, we will keep the community updated with further notifications on this matter.

If you have any concern about the indexing status of your article in either of the two journals, please contact the Editorial Office: IJERPH and JRFM.