Responsible use and integrity

Intended use

OJR describes the citation impact of journals: how often a journal’s recent papers are cited, compared with the world average for papers of the same subfield, year and type. It describes a journal’s papers taken together.

It is not a measure of the quality of individual articles, or of the people who wrote them. Citations are unevenly spread within a journal, so its score says little about any one paper in it. In the UK’s REF 2021, the correlation between journal citation impact and expert scores of article quality was weak to moderate, from ρ = 0.11 to 0.43 across 27 broad fields (Thelwall et al., 2023).

Don’t use OJR, ranks or quartiles to make hiring, promotion or funding decisions about individuals. This follows the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) and the Leiden Manifesto for research metrics: journal-based metrics should not stand in for an assessment of individual work, and indicators should support expert judgement, not replace it.

Reasonable uses include comparing the citation impact of journals within or across fields, following a journal’s trend over the years, and deciding where to look for well-cited work. Even then, read the rank range, the reference coverage and the limitations set out in the methodology.

Citation manipulation

Manipulation means trying to raise a journal’s citation counts other than by publishing work that others find worth citing: for example, editors or reviewers asking authors to cite a journal without scholarly reason, groups of journals citing each other by arrangement, or papers padded with citations to one journal. We do not consider it acceptable, and we describe below what this release does about it, as DORA asks of metric providers.

What OJR does now

• Journal self-citations are left out of OJR, and out of the world average it is compared with.
• Citations from repository-hosted works, such as preprints, are left out.
• Each journal page shows its self-citation share and how concentrated its citations are, so unusual patterns are visible.
• Each rank in the latest year comes with a likely range, so small differences are not read as real ones.

What it does not do yet

• It does not detect citation stacking, where two or more journals cite each other unusually heavily.
• It does not suppress or remove journals. Every journal that meets the eligibility rules is ranked, whatever its citation pattern.
• Self-citations still count in the Impact factor (2-year), as they do in Clarivate’s Journal Impact Factor™.

Reporting a concern

If you see signs of manipulation, write to contact@openjournalrank.com with the journal and what you observed. Reports help us decide which checks to build next. Until a check exists, a report does not change a journal’s score or rank, and we do not publish accusations.

Corrections and versioning

Each release is frozen and versioned: its numbers are computed once from one OpenAlex snapshot and are not edited after publication. Quote a value together with its release.

When we find an error, we correct it in the next release rather than changing a published one. Material errors, those that change a journal’s score, rank or quartile, or the meaning of a page, are listed in the corrections log below, with the release that fixes them.

To report an error, write to contact@openjournalrank.com with the page and what looks wrong.

Corrections log

No corrections have been published for release 2025.2.