Journal Factsheet
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Impact Factor and Indexing

Indexed means your research gets noticed

Impact Factor

PeerJ's latest Impact Factor is 2.7 (see Journal Citation Reports).

PeerJ Computer Science's latest Impact Factor is 3.8 (see Journal Citation Reports).

Whilst we appreciate the importance still placed on the Impact Factor by many elements of the academic community, we believe that individual research articles are best assessed on their own merits, rather than on an aggregate citation count for the journal in which the work is published. This is why we provide article-level metrics on every article page and also why we periodically publish PeerJ's citation distribution. PeerJ's citation distribution is as follows:

  • 90th percentile: 18.6 citations
  • 75th percentile: 10 citations
  • 50th percentile (median): 5 citations
  • 25th percentile: 2 citations

However, we understand that the inclusion of PeerJ and PeerJ Computer Science in the Web of Science SCIE is very important for the many academics whose research output is still measured by metrics such as the Impact Factor. As an academic publisher closely attuned to the needs of the research community, it would be remiss to ignore the Impact Factor entirely and pretend it does not exist. We hope that alongside this information our article-level metrics, citation distribution and transparent publishing process encourages more scientists to submit their work to PeerJ and benefit from broad readership and high-quality peer review.

Indexed & Discoverable

PeerJ is indexed in all major Abstracting & Indexing databases including Pubmed Central (PMC), MEDLINE, Scopus, Web of Science SCIE, Journal Citation Reports, Google Scholar, Europe PMC, DOAJ, Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS), dblp, CiteSeerX, EMBASE, BIOSIS Previews, CAB Abstracts, Biological Abstracts, Zoological Record, AGORA, ARDI, HINARI, OARE, ProQuest databases, EBSCO databases, OCLC, Science Open and Microsoft Academic Search.

PeerJ Computer Science is a multidisciplinary peer-reviewed journal indexed in Pubmed Central (PMC), Scopus, Web of Science SCIE, Journal Citation Reports, Google Scholar, Europe PMC, DOAJ, dblp, CiteSeerX, HINARI, ProQuest databases, OCLC, Inspec, Inspec Analytics and Science Open.

PeerJ Physical Chemistry is indexed in DOAJ, Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS), Inspec and Inspec Analytics

PeerJ Analytical Chemistry is indexed in DOAJ

PeerJ Materials Science is indexed in DOAJ, Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS), Inspec and Inspec Analytics

Article Level Metrics

Just as we don’t believe in paywalls blocking access to content, nor do we believe in an author's work not getting the credit it individually deserves, which is why we include article level metrics on all of our article pages. Our article level metrics enable anyone to see the number of visitors, views and downloads an article has received, and also links to the referral source of visitors.

We believe that an individual article should be judged on its own merits, rather than by a metric such as the Impact Factor which aggregates citations across journal articles, therefore we have made it as easy as possible to immediately view the attention an article is getting. No big time lags, and no chasing for links to the coverage - it's all in one place.

Internet Era Discovery

To maximize discovery in the modern Internet era where most people are using general search engines it takes more than just indexing in the traditional academic databases.

To solve that, we've architected the PeerJ website and article pages ourselves with an eye towards implementing modern machine-readable microdata markup and navigation. In non-tech jargon that means major search engines can build rich snippets of information, such as author biographies, that then turn up in search results.