Editorial Standards

SciFig publishes guides on journal impact factors, figure and formatting requirements, and submission processes. This page explains how those guides are produced, what we check, what we deliberately do not claim, and who to contact when something is wrong.

We would rather show you the machinery than present these pages as something more authoritative than they are.

Where our numbers come from

For any factual claim about a journal, we work from primary sources and we name the one we used.

Figure specifications, word limits, formatting rules, and submission steps come from the publisher's own author guidelines and editorial pages. We read the current version of that page and record the URL and the date we checked it. We do not copy specifications from other guide sites — that would inherit their errors without any way to trace them.

Impact factor, five-year JIF, and quartile come from the publisher's own journal metrics page where the publisher publishes it. Those figures originate from Clarivate's Journal Citation Reports, and we say which JCR release and which citation year every number belongs to. Where a publisher does not publish its impact factor, we say so on the page rather than sourcing the number elsewhere.

Review timelines come from the publisher's own published medians where available, and otherwise from author-reported community data. Author-reported ranges are labelled as such. They describe what authors experienced, not what the journal promises.

Open access fees, indexing status, and publication counts come from the publisher, from DOAJ, and from OpenAlex.

What we do not do

We do not attribute acceptance rates to Journal Citation Reports. Acceptance rates come from publishers and societies that choose to publish them, and we cite those directly.

We do not build year-by-year trend tables unless we hold real values for each of those years. An interpolated trend line looks authoritative and tells you nothing.

We do not present OpenAlex citation averages as impact factors. They are computed on a different denominator and the two numbers can differ several-fold for the same journal. Where we cite an OpenAlex metric, we name it as an OpenAlex metric.

Where a value is our estimate rather than a published figure, we label it as an estimate.

Where a specification has not been published at the time of writing, we say it has not been published and give the date we checked, rather than filling the gap with a plausible guess.

Where our analysis stops

These guides are our reading of publicly available material. They are not the journal's official position, and they are not professional publishing advice.

Editorial boards change. Fees change. Author guidelines are revised without announcement, sometimes between our last check and your submission. Before you submit, confirm the current requirements on the journal's own pages. For high-stakes decisions about where to submit, verify metrics against the publisher's record or Clarivate's Journal Citation Reports if you have access.

Impact factor is one input among many. A journal's fit for your work, its readership, its review model, and its timeline usually matter more to the outcome of a submission than the number does.

How often we re-check

We review impact factor, five-year JIF, and quartile across all journal guides when a new JCR release materially changes them — normally once a year.

We re-check a journal's figure and formatting sections when its publisher revises the author guidelines.

We rewrite a guide when the journal changes title, changes publisher, moves to a different review model, or leaves an index.

We correct individual pages whenever a reader shows us something is wrong.

Every page carries the date it was last reviewed and the sources it was built from.

No affiliation

SciFig is an independent tool. We are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or officially connected to Clarivate Analytics, Web of Science, Journal Citation Reports, Scopus, Elsevier, or any journal or publisher discussed on this site.

All trademarks, service marks, and company names referenced here are the property of their respective owners. Journal names are used to identify the journals being described.

Who is responsible

SciFig is the publisher of this content. Editorial responsibility for the journal guides sits with Alex Carter, Founder, SciFig.

If you find an error — a wrong specification, an outdated figure, a broken source link — write to hello@scifig.ai and we will correct it. Tell us which page and what you believe the correct value is, and we will check it against the publisher's current documentation.

Corrections and questions about how a particular guide was researched are welcome.