Subtle but Important Shifts in the 2025 Journal Citation Reports
How concerns about trust and research integrity are reshaping academic publishing’s most influential metric
The Annual Ritual
I had just published a Substack on journal quartiles, offering my thoughts on what they mean and how researchers should interpret them. Refreshing my emails, I saw the message I had been eagerly anticipating: the release of the 2025 Journal Citation Reports (JCR, Clarivate). This is the big one. The Impact Factor. The journal metric that matters above all others.
For most Editors-in-Chief – myself included – this is the moment of truth. Have we moved up the league table or down? Has our quartile rank shifted? Do we have an opportunity to humblebrag to our peers, or do we need to keep our heads down and pretend we were never that interested in a flawed metric anyway?
The Impact Factor emerged in the 1960s and was predicated on a simple assumption: if articles published in a journal are cited frequently by other researchers, that journal is exerting greater influence on the development of knowledge within a field.
Retractions and Research Integrity
Over the past few years there have been subtle, but important, shifts in how Clarivate presents the Journal Impact Factor. Historically, the metric was framed primarily as a measure of research influence. Increasingly, however, research integrity has become a focus of the discussion surrounding journal metrics.
The clearest example in the 2025 Journal Citation Reports was the exclusion of retracted articles from Impact Factor calculations. The practical effects were, shall we say, modest.
Not to downplay the importance of the change which likely lies less in its ranking impact than the message it sends. By excluding citations associated with retracted research, Clarivate is explicitly acknowledging that not all citations are equal indicators of influence. The message is subtle but important: how citations are generated now appears to matter, not just how many have been accumulated.
Retractions have increased dramatically over the past two decades and concerns about manipulated peer review, paper mills, and AI-generated manuscripts have become central to discussions about research integrity.
The optimistic interpretation is that retracted research exerts relatively little influence on citation patterns. Despite the attention (for example, through the Retraction Watch blog) that high-profile retractions receive, their contribution to most journals’ citation performance appears negligible.
The more pessimistic interpretation is that citation-based metrics are not sensitive enough to capture the effects of research integrity issues. Journals rack up citations regardless of whether the underlying research is sound.
If that interpretation is correct, the challenge facing academic publishing is not simply how to identify problematic research. It is whether our most treasured metrics can distinguish between influence and trustworthiness.
Suppressions and Citation Manipulation
Another attention-grabbing feature of this year’s release is the suppression of journals for citation manipulation. This year, twenty journals lost their Impact Factors because of excessive self-citation or citation stacking, a marked increase over recent years.
The 2025 suppression list offers little evidence that citation manipulation is confined to specific fields. Suppressed journals were from education, health, engineering and materials science, suggesting that manipulation practices are a cross-discipline issue.
The growing list of journals suppressed for citation manipulation may be one of the clearest signs that the role of the Impact Factor is changing. Clarivate seems increasingly focused not just on measuring influence, but also ensuring that influence has been generated in ways the academic community regards as credible.
Growth and Quartile Anxiety
The Journal Citation Reports continue to expand. In the 2025 release, more than 600 journals received an Impact Factor for the first time. Gold Open Access journals now represent around 28% of all journals included in the Journal Citation Reports, underscoring that they have become an established part of mainstream academic publishing.
Which neatly brings us to my favourite topic of the moment: quartile obsession.
I’ve said this before (and will likely say it again), researchers tend to treat quartiles as if they were fixed indicators of journal quality. In reality, journals routinely move up and down rankings. A journal’s quartile often tells us as much about the performance of neighbouring journals as it does about its own.
In a recent Substack article, ‘When Is a Q1 Paper Not a Q1 Paper?’, I explored why quartile shifts are often awarded far more significant than the underlying data suggests.
https://open.substack.com/pub/richardjgray68/p/when-is-a-q1-paper-not-a-q1-paper?r=5zhnkf&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web
A Changing Conversation
The Impact Factor has always attracted criticism. What feels different now is that concerns about research integrity, citation manipulation, and trustworthiness have become central to the conversation.
Perhaps the most revealing insight from the 2025 Journal Citation Reports is not the metric scores, but how much effort is now being devoted to protecting them.