Clarivate’s Journal Citation Reports has made two major changes for the 2023 release. The first is that it has greatly expanded the number of journals receiving a Journal Impact Factor, or “JIF”. (Journal Impact Factor is a calculation of the number citations to a journal in the last two years divided by the number of citable items from those two years.) Journals in the Arts and Humanities Citation Index and the Emerging Sources Citation Index are now covered. This year those journals only receive a number; next year Clarivate will also include rankings based on the newly covered journals’ JIF against others in its category. Interestingly, the newly covered journals are ranked this year by another metric, the Journal Citation Indicator, which is the average of citable items’ Category Normalized Citation Impact.
The other important big change in that JIF is only reported to one decimal place, rather than three. This cuts out some of the false precision that going to three decimals created. This also means there will be more ties. If you notice that some categories have more than a quarter of its journals in its quartile ranking, that is due to the increased number of ties between journals.
It will be interesting to see the effect of expanding JIFs into new disciplines. There is plenty of pushback to using metrics such as JIF in assessing research and researchers, though the practice continues.