Citation issues cost these 20 journals their impact factors this year

Twenty journals lost their impact factors in this year’s Journal Citation Reports, released today, for excessive self-citation and citation stacking. Nearly half of the journals on the list are from well-known publishers MDPI, Sage, Springer, Taylor & Francis and Wiley. 

Clarivate releases the annual Journal Citation Reports each June. For the first time, the company excluded citations to retracted papers when calculating this year’s impact factors. Amy Bourke-Waite, a communications director for Clarivate, told Retraction Watch this change affected 1% of journals, none of which lost impact factors in 2025. 

Many institutions use the controversial metric as an indicator of journal quality. And suppressing a journal’s impact factor can have negative effects on the publication and the authors who publish papers in it. 

In 2024, Clarivate suppressed 17 impact factors, a substantial increase from 2023’s four. 

The company suppressed four journals this year for citation stacking, which it defines as two or more journals citing each other at an “unusually high rate.” The rest lost their impact factor for self-citation, when a journal has “an unusually high percentage” of citations to itself. 

We reached out to the publishers of all the journals on the suppression list and heard back from representatives for 10 of them.

Sami Sajjadifar, the CEO of Sami Publishing Company in Ilam, Iran, which publishes Chemical Methodologies, told us the decision to suppress the journal’s impact factor was “very wrong and dangerous.” He said Chemical Methodologies’ impact factor was suppressed because of how often they were cited by another journal on the list, Applied Organometallic Chemistry. According to Sajjadifar, 17% of all citations from AOC were to Chemical Methodologies papers. 

In correspondence seen by us in which he contested the decision, Sajjadifar mentions “genuine scientific overlap in research scope” between material in the journals. He credited the citations to “breakthroughs in green organometallic methodologies and homogeneous catalysis” in recent years and denied any ties to AOC or Wiley. 

A spokesperson for Wiley, which publishes Applied Organometallic Chemistry, noted Clarivate “makes no accusation of wrongdoing” when suppressing a journal’s impact factor, and that the company is “disappointed in the decision.” An internal investigation “found no integrity issues,” said the spokesperson, who told us Wiley appealed the decision. 

Laura West, a public affairs manager for Sage, told us an “investigation is currently underway” to address citation concerns with the journal Clinical Hemorheology and Microcirculation. 

Similarly, Marieke Cambeen, executive vice president of Springer Nature’s Springer portfolio, said the publisher was looking into five of its journals that did not receive impact factors this year. 

Mark Robinson of Taylor & Francis said the publisher was investigating Mechanics of Advanced Materials and Structures “before Clarivate notified us about their decision.”

The other journals with suppressed impact factors did not immediately respond to our request for comment or asked for additional time to respond. 

Here is the full list of journals: 

With additional reporting by Rita Aksenfeld.

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