Public Understanding of Science

Our screening does not flag Public Understanding of Science. That is not a guarantee of quality — it means the venue is not on Beall's archive (frozen since 2017) and does not match our name-pattern heuristic. It is listed in Scopus, Web of Science, PubMed, which is a positive signal.

Per our venue index, Public Understanding of Science appears in: Scopus, Web of Science, PubMed. Index membership changes over time — confirm on the index's own site before relying on it.

Papers in Public Understanding of Science are cited about 3.7 times each within two years of publication, and Scimago places it in Q1, with an h-index of 130. Those are the open equivalents: the Clarivate Journal Impact Factor is a proprietary metric we neither compute nor license, so we show the two-year citation rate and Scimago quartile instead — they answer the same question of how heavily the journal is cited. A citation rate is a property of a field as much as of a journal.

In the Scimago Journal Rank 2025 edition, Public Understanding of Science is Q1 in all 3 of its subject categories. By category: Communication: Q1, #43 of 503; Arts and Humanities (miscellaneous): Q1, #45 of 817; Developmental and Educational Psychology: Q1, #77 of 380. Quartiles split the journals in a subject category into four equal groups by SJR, so Q1 is the most-cited quarter and Q4 the least; Public Understanding of Science is cited about 3.7 times per paper over two years, with an h-index of 130.

The Web of Science quartile comes from Clarivate's Journal Citation Reports (JCR), a proprietary product we neither license nor compute — so we cannot state a JCR quartile for Public Understanding of Science. The open equivalent is its Scimago quartile, Q1, derived from Scopus citation data. Because JCR ranks against Web of Science and Scimago against Scopus, the two can differ, so check Clarivate's site directly if you need the JCR quartile specifically.

Our index records its access status as "hybrid". Where this is derived from publisher-level signals rather than works-level data it is a heuristic, so confirm on the journal's own site — particularly if an article processing charge matters to you.