Impact Factors measure how often articles in scientific journals are cited—specifically, the average number of citations received in a given year by articles published in that journal over the previous two years, as tracked in the Web of Science. For researchers, the number answers a practical question: how often is work published in this journal being picked up and built upon?
The metric is assigned to the journal as a whole, not to individual articles. A high Impact Factor tells you something useful about a journal's place in its field; it tells you less about any single paper within it.
For a complementary, article-level view, MDPI lists an Altmetric score on each article page. Where the Impact Factor tracks academic citations, the Altmetric score captures broader online attention: how an article is being shared, discussed, and referenced beyond the journal literature. Together, they offer two different ways of asking the same question: is this research reaching people?
With 2025 CiteScores from Scopus published a few weeks ago, Clarivate has now released this year's Journal Impact Factors in the Journal Citation Reports (JCR).
254 MDPI Journals Saw a Rise in Impact Factor
This year's JCR include 330 MDPI journals across a wide range of disciplines. Of these, 231 journals are placed in the top 50% (Q1 or Q2) of their respective subject categories, a result that spans fields as different as materials science, public health, environmental studies, and mathematics. 78 journals hold a top-quartile position (Q1), and 33 journals have a JIF of 5.0 or above.
- 330 journals earned a Journal Impact Factor (JIF)
- 29 journals earned a first JIF
- 254 journals had an increase in JIF
- 71% of ranked journals are in Q1 or Q2
For the full metrics on any MDPI journal, visit our Web of Science journals overview page or a journal's individual statistics page.
29 MDPI Journals Received Their First Journal Impact Factor
A first Impact Factor is a confirmation for an emerging journal. It marks the point at which a journal has been publishing long enough, and cited broadly enough, to enter the formal record of scientific influence. For the research communities those journals serve, it signals that the work being published is being read and built upon.
This year, 29 MDPI journals received a Journal Impact Factor for the first time, across a range of emerging and established research areas. Each represents years of editorial development and peer review—recognized in 2026 for the first time in the JCR.
This is also part of a longer shift in how science gets indexed. When the Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI) launched in 2016, 24 MDPI journals were included. By 2024 that number had grown to over 200, reflecting a broader change in the visibility of open access publishing within major citation tracking systems, not just at MDPI but across the sector.
Open Access with Impact
MDPI journals have received a total of 25.2 million citations in Web of Science. That figure matters less as a measure of MDPI's reach and more as a measure of what happens when research is freely available: it gets found, read, and used. Open access is only meaningful if the work actually travels and citations are one indicator that it does.
More than 4.6 million authors have published with MDPI. That breadth, across disciplines, institutions, and geographies, is what makes open access at this scale worth doing.
Thank You to the MDPI Scholarly Community
These results belong to the people who do the actual work: the Editors-in-Chief who set the standards, the Editorial Board Members and reviewers who hold them, and the authors who choose open access for their research. The numbers in the Journal Citation Reports are the downstream effect of decisions made at the desk, in the review, and at submission. Thank you for making them.
Data: 2025 Journal Impact Factors, Journal Citation Reports™ (Clarivate, 2026)
