The End of Journal Impact Factor Purgatory (and Numbers to the Thousandths) - The Scholarly Kitchen

"Clarivate Analytics announced today that they are granting all journals in the Web of Science Core Collection an Impact Factor with the 2023 release.... In 2015, Clarivate launched the ESCI. It was initially described as an index of journals that are up-and-coming — meaning new journals, or established journals in niche areas that are growing in impact. At the time of launch, publishers were told that a journal selected for ESCI will likely get an Impact Factor within a few years. The model for ESCI seemed to shift a few years later and there are many journals in ESCI that have been there since 2015 that still don’t have Impact Factors. In fact, Clarivate includes content for indexed journals back to 2005 so there clearly were journals older than 10 years in the database when it launched. Clarivate reports that ESCI has over 7800 journals with 3 million records. A little over a third of those records are open access records. The inclusion criteria for all four indices include 24 quality measures and four “impact” measures. Those journals that meet all 28 criteria are included in SCIE, SSCI, and AHCI. Those that only meet the 24 quality measures were relegated to the ESCI.... The second big announcement today is that with the 2023 release, Clarivate will “display” Impact Factors with only one decimal place instead of three! ..."   This change announced today indicates that the four impact measures are no longer required in order to get an Impact Factor...."