PLOS ONE Impact Factor 2026: 2.8, Q2 Multidisciplinary

PLOS ONE's impact factor is 2.8 — the 2025 JIF, from the 2026 JCR release.

This page gives you the number and the quartile first, then the things that actually decide whether PLOS ONE is the right venue: the h5-index it is usually searched alongside, what a 2.8 does and does not tell you at a journal that publishes 18,300 papers a year, and how to get the figure from PLOS itself when it is going somewhere consequential.

What is PLOS ONE's impact factor?

"We do not consider Impact Factor to be a reliable or useful metric to assess the performance of individual articles but will provide the metric to individuals when specifically requested."

PLOS ONE at a glance

You searched 2026 — why this is the 2025 JIF

Which name you should use depends on who is reading:

• On a grant or promotion form, write it as the 2025 JIF from the 2026 JCR release. That is unambiguous and survives being checked.
• When comparing journals, make sure every figure in the comparison comes from the same release. A 2.8 from the 2026 release and a competitor's number from the 2025 release are not comparable, and mixed-vintage tables are the most common way a shortlist goes wrong.

The value for the previous metric year was 2.6. If a source shows you 2.6 and calls it current, it is a release behind.

Where this number comes from, and how to check it yourself

The chain is short: Clarivate calculates the JIF and publishes it in the Journal Citation Reports; JCR is a paid database; sites that surface the values for free are re-reporting them. PLOS sits outside that chain by choice, and says so:

"All of our journals have a range of metrics available, including the Journal Impact Factor™, SJR, CiteScore, and h-index, which are available from the respective databases. In line with our DORA commitment, these subjective metrics are not promoted by PLOS."

Three ways to verify, in descending order of authority:

Is PLOS ONE Q1 or Q2?

The indexing underneath it is checkable at the primary source. Clarivate's Master Journal List records:

Two practical consequences. If your institution's rules are written around SCIE-listed journals, PLOS ONE qualifies. If they are written around Q1 journals in a named category, it does not — and no amount of arguing about the breadth of the category changes the box on the form.

Is PLOS ONE's impact factor rising or falling?

Neither, on any horizon short enough to matter. It fell for most of the 2010s, spiked in 2020–2021, and has settled around 2.6–2.9 since. The year-by-year series compiled by third-party JCR sites reads:

That series comes from a third-party compilation rather than from Clarivate or PLOS, so treat the shape as reliable and individual decimal places as approximate. The shape is the informative part. The journal sat between 2.7 and 3.1 for most of the second half of the 2010s, rose to 3.752 in 2021 and 3.7 in 2022, and has since come back to where it spent that earlier stretch — so the recent decline reads as a return to the journal's own baseline rather than a fall below it.

What this means when you are choosing where to submit: a 0.2 movement year to year is noise. If a committee is comparing your paper's venue against another at 3.0, they are comparing two journals that have swapped places repeatedly over the last decade.

Beyond the headline: h5-index, CiteScore, and SJR

The JIF is one indicator among several, and searches for PLOS ONE routinely pair it with the others. Here is what can be stated and what cannot.

What this number does not tell you

An impact factor describes a citation distribution for a whole journal. For PLOS ONE specifically, three things it does not tell you matter more than usual:

• What gets accepted. PLOS ONE's stated publication criteria assess technical soundness, not perceived importance. The seven criteria cover originality, prior publication, technical standard, whether conclusions follow from the data, intelligible English, research ethics, and reporting and data-availability standards. Novelty is not among them. A journal that does not select for significance will have a citation profile that looks nothing like one that does.
• What your own paper will do. Journal-level averages are dominated by a small number of heavily cited papers in any venue, and in a journal publishing 18,300 articles a year, the average tells you very little about any individual article.
• Whether your figures will pass production. Editorial acceptance at PLOS ONE is provisional, and formatting is checked afterwards. That is a separate gate from peer review, and it is the one most likely to add weeks to your timeline.

Preparing figures for PLOS ONE

If PLOS ONE is on your shortlist, the figure rules are unusual in two directions at once, and both are worth knowing before you draw anything.

Should you submit to PLOS ONE?

• Your work is methodologically sound but not the kind of result that wins a novelty argument — the publication criteria do not include one
• You need more figures, more supporting information or more words than a display-item cap would allow
• Replication studies, negative results or null results are what you have; all three are explicitly in scope
• Your work is interdisciplinary enough that specialist journals keep sending it away as out of scope
• A 26% acceptance rate and a 32-day median to first decision fit your timeline better than a longer shot at a selective venue

• Your evaluation environment requires a Q1 journal in a named category
• $2,477 is not covered by a grant, an institutional agreement or a fee-assistance route — the fee is payable on acceptance, which is late to discover it
• You need the venue's name to do the signalling work by itself
• Your timeline cannot absorb a 209-day median from submission to publication

Frequently asked questions

Sources

Journal facts, acceptance rate and timing come from PLOS's own pages; the indexing position comes from Clarivate. The impact factor itself is not published by PLOS and is attributed to the third-party compilations listed below. Reviewed 2026.

• PLOS ONE — Journal Information — PLOS's position on the Impact Factor, publication criteria, scope, licence and indexing
• PLOS — Metrics — 2025 acceptance rate, time to first decision, time to publication and articles published, with the DORA statement
• PLOS ONE — Publishing Information — eISSN, founding year, current volume, publishing schedule
• Clarivate Master Journal List — PLOS ONE — Web of Science Core Collection status and additional indexes (search by ISSN 1932-6203)
• PLOS — Publication fees — the $2,477 article processing charge and the fee-assistance routes
• The impact factor, quartile and year series come from compilations of the Journal Citation Reports. The two routes to the figure itself — the JCR entry and a request to PLOS — are set out above