OpenJournalRank is a free journal ranking. It measures field-normalized citation impact from open OpenAlex data, and it publishes the method and the results so anyone can check every score. Its code will be published under the MIT License.
Free, no accountEvery journal page, ranking and comparison is open to read. There is no login and no paywall.
Open dataThe published data is CC BY 4.0, built from OpenAlex, which is CC0. The code will be published under the MIT License.
Reproducible releasesReleases are annual and computed from a frozen snapshot. Each one is sealed with a SHA-256 manifest.
Researchers, librarians and funders rely on journal metrics, and some good free ones exist. Very few of them let an outsider see the inputs, rerun the calculation and reuse the result.
The most-cited metrics sit behind a subscription
The Journal Impact Factor is published in Journal Citation Reports, which needs an institutional subscription. Clarivate prohibits wholesale sharing of JCR data outside the subscribing institution[1]. The formula is published, but which items count as “citable” in the denominator is decided by Clarivate journal by journal[2].
Google Scholar Metrics is free, but its counts are produced automatically from an index you cannot export[28].
Free metrics rest on data you can’t redistribute
CiteScore, SJR and SNIP are free to view. All three are computed from Scopus, and Scopus terms forbid systematic reproduction or redistribution[13]. SCImago allows only non-commercial use with a citation[19]. Recomputing these numbers means licensing the same database.
Some sites are open: OOIR offers its rankings under CC0[44] and Exaly is CC BY-SA[47]. Neither normalizes its headline metric by field.
Little context, and hard comparisons
Most rankings show one number. Price is rarely shown: SJR shows an estimated APC, not the listed price[18]. JCR leaves out citations to and from retracted papers, but only subscribers see it[6]. We found no free ranking site that shows retractions.
Raw citation averages vary widely between fields[21]. Without normalization, a side-by-side comparison of journals from different fields can mislead.
“We are monitoring and incentivizing open science using closed data.”
How we compare
OpenJournalRank next to ten other sources
Each tool has strengths. JCR is curated, Scopus has wide coverage, SJR is free and rich in context, and SNIP’s field normalization is rigorous. This comparison asks a narrower question: can you get the numbers, reuse them and rebuild them? Cells cite the sources listed at the bottom of the page.
Checked:These tools change, so an entry may be out of date. Each one cites what we read on that date.
Yes
Partly
No
Unclear
Icons mark how fully a tool meets each point; coverage and updates are described without a rating. Small raised numbers link to the sources below.
Values never change within a release. That makes them reproducible but slower to reflect new citations than a live index. Release 2025.2 uses the OpenAlex snapshot of September 23, 2026.
Even with access, the JIF denominator depends on Clarivate’s judgement of which items are “citable”. Document types are assigned at the section level, and each journal is reviewed individually.
Partly: Formula published; citable-item rules editorial[2]
Partly: JIF: no. JCI: yes, by category, year and type[4]
22,643 journals (JCR 2026), curated from Web of Science Core Collection[3, 8]
Partly: Free for personal, non-commercial use; Analytics is paid[30]
No: Personal use only; no redistribution or text mining[31]
Partly: Free data access for approved research projects[32]
Through its SRAD programme, Digital Science gives university researchers free access to the API and BigQuery data for non-commercial scientometric work, by application. The data still cannot be redistributed.
Partly: FCR and RCR defined; field codes assigned by machine[33]
Partly: At article level (FCR, RCR); no journal metric of its own[33]
CiteScore itself is a raw citations-per-document ratio. Scopus Sources adds a percentile and rank within each subject category, which helps within a field but not across fields.
32,089 active titles, selected by an advisory board[9, 15]
SCImago’s FAQ says SJR is updated every June. A university library reports that the 2025 edition came out on 15 April 2026.
Partly: Self-cites, international collaboration, OA flag, estimated APC; no retractions[18]
SJR shows an estimated APC, which SCImago says does not reflect the actual APC. Retractions are not shown. SCImago offers integrity indicators as a separate product.
Values never change within a release. That makes them reproducible but slower to reflect new citations than a live index. Release 2025.2 uses the OpenAlex snapshot of September 23, 2026.
Even with access, the JIF denominator depends on Clarivate’s judgement of which items are “citable”. Document types are assigned at the section level, and each journal is reviewed individually.
Method documented
Partly: Formula published; citable-item rules editorial[2]
Field-normalized
Partly: JIF: no. JCI: yes, by category, year and type[4]
Coverage
22,643 journals (JCR 2026), curated from Web of Science Core Collection[3, 8]
Partly: Free for personal, non-commercial use; Analytics is paid[30]
Data licence
No: Personal use only; no redistribution or text mining[31]
Recomputable by others
Partly: Free data access for approved research projects[32]
Through its SRAD programme, Digital Science gives university researchers free access to the API and BigQuery data for non-commercial scientometric work, by application. The data still cannot be redistributed.
Method documented
Partly: FCR and RCR defined; field codes assigned by machine[33]
Field-normalized
Partly: At article level (FCR, RCR); no journal metric of its own[33]
CiteScore itself is a raw citations-per-document ratio. Scopus Sources adds a percentile and rank within each subject category, which helps within a field but not across fields.
Coverage
32,089 active titles, selected by an advisory board[9, 15]
SCImago’s FAQ says SJR is updated every June. A university library reports that the 2025 edition came out on 15 April 2026.
Context shown
Partly: Self-cites, international collaboration, OA flag, estimated APC; no retractions[18]
SJR shows an estimated APC, which SCImago says does not reflect the actual APC. Retractions are not shown. SCImago offers integrity indicators as a separate product.
The rankings are original analysis of open data from OpenAlex. The data files behind every page are public, and you can reuse them with attribution. The pipeline that turns OpenAlex records into rankings will be published under the MIT License.
Licences
Source codeMIT (to be published)
Data and page textCC BY 4.0
OpenAlex inputsCC0
Sealed, reproducible releases
Each release is computed once from a frozen OpenAlex snapshot. Its sealed manifest records every file’s path, size and SHA-256 hash, plus the build commit. A deploy is refused if any file differs from the manifest.
Release 2025.2 manifest records
release 2025.2
snapshot OpenAlex, 2026-09-23
method nci3-v1
commit the Git commit the release was built from
files[] path · size · sha256
Field-normalized
The OpenJournalRank Indicator (OJR) is a free, publicly available metric of a journal’s field-normalized citation impact, computed from open OpenAlex citation data. It compares citations to a journal’s papers from the previous three years with the world average for papers of the same subfield, year and type, so 1.00 is the world average and values can be compared across fields. It is computed with the NCI3 method.
The OJR (OpenJournalRank Indicator) compares a journal’s citations with the world average for papers of the same subfield, publication year and type. A score of 1.0 means its papers were cited as often as that average. Ranks come with likely ranges, and trajectories show which journals are rising or falling.
A score alone can hide a lot. Each journal page sets the score beside measures of cost, integrity and publishing mix, and compares each one with its field.
OA share
Listed APC (USD)
Self-citation
Retractions
International collaboration
Output growth
Document mix
Impact factor (2-year)
Compare side by side
Add journals from any page and compare their scores, ranks, trajectories and context measures in one view, all on the same definitions.
Try itOpen a journal and choose Add to compare. Go to Journals
Free, with no account
There is no sign-up, no subscription tier and no hidden premium score. Every page shows how its numbers were calculated and links to the method.
How pages are madeEvery ranking figure is computed by our code from a frozen OpenAlex snapshot; provider values are labelled as OpenAlex values. Page text uses fixed templates filled with computed numbers. No page text is written by AI. This process makes scores reproducible and applies the same definitions to every journal.
What we don’t do (yet)
Known limitations
Open data has gaps too. These are the ones that most affect our numbers.
Incomplete reference lists
A citation is counted only if OpenAlex captured the citing paper’s reference list[58]. In this release, 84.3% of 2025 articles and reviews had at least one matched reference (87.1% for 2024). Every score shows its citing year’s coverage.
Document types
OpenAlex assigns document types automatically. A study of an earlier snapshot found it classed almost no journal items as reviews, where Scopus and Web of Science classed about 9–10%[52]. OpenAlex has since added a review type, but a 2025 study still found far more type errors in OpenAlex than in Web of Science[53]. Because reviews are cited more, we show each journal’s review share and an articles-only OJR next to the main score.
New and untested
Methods are versioned (nci3-v1), and any change will appear in a new release rather than altering an old one.
Core journals only, for now
This release covers 33,339 CWTS Core journals[41]. Journals outside that list, including many regional and non-English journals, are not ranked yet. They will be added later as a separate population. The world-average baseline includes every journal in OpenAlex, including journals outside the ranked set.
Annual, not live
Values are frozen for a year so that they can be reproduced. Scopus’s monthly CiteScore Tracker will reflect new citations sooner[9].
Not a quality verdict
The OJR measures citation impact under a published method. It does not judge research quality or endorse a journal. These are this site’s quartiles, not SCImago, Scopus or Journal Impact Factor (JIF) quartiles. Citations from repository-hosted works, such as preprints and data archives, are excluded by policy.
The code will be published under the OpenJournalRank organization; contact us for access meanwhile.
How to cite
Name the release, because values are recomputed for every year in each release. Say if you changed the data.
OpenJournalRank, release 2025.2, computed from the OpenAlex snapshot of September 23, 2026. Licensed under CC BY 4.0. https://openjournalrank.com
Please also credit OpenAlex as the data source[42].
Sources
Sources
Checked on October 19, 2026. Some vendor pages block automated reading. In those cases we used the vendor’s press release or a library guide, and marked anything we could not confirm as “unclear”. Corrections are welcome at contact@openjournalrank.com.
Barcelona Declaration on Open Research Information. Preamble, 2024.
OpenJournalRank. Source code, method and data licence (MIT; CC BY 4.0). To be published under the OpenJournalRank organization; available on request meanwhile.
OpenJournalRank. OpenAlex reference coverage by year, 13 October 2026.
Journal Impact Factor™ and Journal Citation Reports™ are trademarks of Clarivate. CiteScore™ is a trademark and Scopus® a registered trademark of Elsevier B.V. SJR is an indicator of SCImago. Google Scholar is a trademark of Google LLC. Dimensions is a product of Digital Science. OpenJournalRank is not affiliated with or endorsed by any of them.
The OJR and our quartiles are computed independently from OpenAlex. They are not Journal Impact Factor, CiteScore, SJR or SNIP values.
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