Journal quartile
What is a journal quartile?
A journal quartile is the quarter of its subject category a journal falls into when the category's journals are ranked by a citation indicator. Q1 is the top 25%, Q4 the bottom 25%. Two systems share the word: Scimago quartiles, cut from the SCImago Journal Rank (SJR) on Scopus data and published openly, and Journal Citation Reports (JCR) quartiles, cut from Clarivate's Journal Impact Factor on Web of Science data and available under licence. They rank different journal sets by different indicators, so they do not always agree.
Definition
A quartile is a rank position, not a score. Take every journal a ranking body lists in one subject category, order them by its indicator — SJR for Scimago, the Journal Impact Factor for the JCR — and cut the ordered list into four equal parts. The top quarter is Q1, then Q2, then Q3, and the bottom quarter is Q4.
Because the cut is relative, a Q1 journal in a small, lightly cited field can have a far lower citation rate than a Q2 journal in a large, heavily cited one. The quartile says where a journal sits among its peers; it says nothing about how many citations its papers earn in absolute terms, and it is not a judgement on any individual paper.
Scimago quartiles vs JCR (Web of Science) quartiles
Scimago quartiles come from the SCImago Journal Rank, an indicator computed from Scopus citation data and published openly at scimagojr.com for every journal Scopus indexes. JCR quartiles come from Clarivate's Journal Citation Reports, computed from the Journal Impact Factor on Web of Science data and available only under licence.
The two systems rank different sets of journals with different indicators, so a journal can be Q1 in one and Q2 in the other, and a journal that Scopus indexes but Web of Science does not has a Scimago quartile and no JCR quartile at all. Funders, promotion committees and national evaluation schemes often specify which system they mean — check before you rely on a quartile in an application.
Why one journal can hold two quartiles at once
Journals are ranked per subject category, and many belong to more than one. A materials journal might be Q1 in one Scimago category and Q2 in another in the same year. Scimago publishes the quartile for every category a journal is assigned to, and also a 'best quartile' — the highest it reaches in any of them.
The quartile on our journal profiles is that best Scimago quartile, which is why each profile says the journal is placed 'for its subject category'. If your field has its own category list, look the journal up in that category specifically.
How to read a quartile
Four things a quartile does and does not tell you:
- It is relative and per category — Q1 means 'in the top quarter of this list this year', not 'highly cited in absolute terms'.
- It is recomputed every year, so a journal can move between quartiles as its citation rate and its category's composition change.
- A Q4 journal is not a bad journal: most Q4 titles are small, regional, new or specialised journals that are legitimately indexed and reviewed. Predatory journals usually have no quartile at all, because they are not in Scopus in the first place.
- It is one signal among several. The same profile shows the SJR the quartile was cut from, the two-year cites-per-paper rate, the h-index and which indexes list the journal — read them together.
Where we show it, and what we do not show
Every journal profile at /journals shows the journal's best Scimago quartile beside its SJR, its OpenAlex two-year cites-per-paper rate and its h-index, with the date the venue index was built. The ranked lists at /best-journals-for order each field's journals by quartile first and cites per paper second, with predatory venues excluded; both are free to browse.
We do not show JCR quartiles or the Journal Impact Factor: both are Clarivate products we neither license nor compute, and we will not print a rank we cannot stand behind. To rank candidate journals for a specific manuscript rather than browse a field, the Journal Finder costs 15 credits per run and shows each candidate's quartile beside its fit to your paper.