Journal Metrics Lookup
Type a journal's title or ISSN and see what OpenAlex knows about it: how many works it has published, how often they are cited, its h-index and two-year mean citedness, how much of it is open access, whether it is in DOAJ or MEDLINE, and its advertised article processing charge. These are OpenAlex metrics — not the Journal Impact Factor and not CiteScore. Free, no sign-up.
Enter a journal title or ISSN to see its OpenAlex metrics.
How to Use the Journal Metrics Lookup
- 1. Enter the journal. Part of the title is enough — “national academy sciences” — or an ISSN such as
0027-8424. Print and online ISSNs both work. - 2. Press Look up. A title search returns up to eight candidate sources; the best match is shown, and the others are buttons under the heading. An ISSN returns exactly that journal.
- 3. Read the metrics. The top row gives works, citations, h-index, i10-index, two-year mean citedness and the open-access share. Below are the access and indexing flags and a table of the last ten years.
- 4. Copy the summary into your notes or journal shortlist, or follow the link to the journal's page on OpenAlex.
These Are Not the Journal Impact Factor
The Journal Impact Factor is a Clarivate figure, published each year in Journal Citation Reports for journals Clarivate selects. CiteScore is Elsevier's, calculated from Scopus. Neither is available for free lookup here, and the numbers on this page will not match them: OpenAlex counts citations from its own graph of scholarly works, and its metrics have no editorial rules about which items count as citable. Treat the figures as a free, open way to compare journals on a consistent footing — never as a substitute for the official ones when a funder, committee or form asks for a JIF.
If you already have the counts and want the arithmetic, use the Impact Factor Calculator to divide them the Clarivate way.
What Each Metric Means
| Metric | What it measures | Read it with care |
|---|---|---|
| Works | Items OpenAlex has attributed to the journal. | Includes editorials, letters and errata, not only research articles. |
| Citations | Citations received by all those works, ever. | A big, old journal will always be big; compare with citations per work. |
| h-index | The largest h such that h works have at least h citations each. | Grows with size and age, so it favours large, long-running journals. |
| i10-index | Works with at least 10 citations. | A count, not a rate — size dominates it too. |
| 2-year mean citedness | OpenAlex's impact-factor-style average of recent citations per recent work. | Skewed by a few highly cited papers; different from the JIF. |
| Open-access works | Share of works with a free copy somewhere, per OpenAlex. | Counts green and bronze copies, not only open-access publishing. |
Reading the Open-Access Rows
- Fully open-access journal — every article is free to read at publication.
- Directory of Open Access Journals — DOAJ vets fully open-access journals against published criteria; a listing, and the year it began, is a useful quality signal.
- Article processing charge — the publisher's advertised list price, in the currencies OpenAlex has on record. Waivers, discounts and institutional agreements often change what you pay, so confirm with the publisher.
- MEDLINE and CWTS Core — whether the journal is indexed in the National Library of Medicine's MEDLINE database, or on the CWTS Core list of sources behind the Leiden Ranking. Neither is the same as being in Web of Science or Scopus.
An Example: Three Journals Compared
These are the figures OpenAlex returned on 16 October 2026 for three well-known journals. They move daily, so your results will differ a little.
| PLOS ONE | Nature | PNAS | |
|---|---|---|---|
| ISSN-L | 1932-6203 | 0028-0836 | 0027-8424 |
| Works | 343,320 | 448,975 | 173,145 |
| h-index | 594 | 1,839 | 1,167 |
| 2-year mean citedness | 3.43 | 19.36 | 8.91 |
| Open-access works | 100% | 17.1% | 98.0% |
| Fully open access | Yes | No | No |
| Listed APC | US$2,382 | US$12,690 | None listed |
Read side by side, the table shows why one number never settles the choice: PNAS has almost all of its articles free to read yet is not a fully open-access journal, so its flags and its charge differ from PLOS ONE's, and Nature's high mean citedness comes with the highest charge to publish open access.
Using Journal Metrics Sensibly
Journal-level metrics describe a journal's citation record, not the quality of any article in it; a few papers usually earn most of a journal's citations. The San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) asks institutions not to use journal metrics as a stand-in for the merit of individual papers or researchers. For choosing where to submit, scope, readership, peer-review practice, indexing and cost matter at least as much — see How Peer Review Works (and How to Check a Journal).
What Is Sent, and Where
When you press Look up, your browser sends the title or ISSN you typed to OpenAlex's public API at api.openalex.org. Nothing goes to CitationEasy, no account or key is used, and nothing is saved. Requests carry CitationEasy's support address as a courtesy to OpenAlex. OpenAlex gives keyless visitors a small daily budget shared by everyone on the same network, so a heavily used network may see an error; a title search costs one request and an ISSN lookup none.
Frequently Asked Questions
- Is this the journal impact factor?
- No. The Journal Impact Factor is calculated by Clarivate and published in Journal Citation Reports. The tool shows OpenAlex's impact-factor-style two-year mean citedness, computed from OpenAlex's data, which is a similar idea but a different number.
- How do I find a journal's real impact factor?
- Look in Clarivate's Journal Citation Reports, which most university libraries subscribe to, or on the journal's own site, where publishers often quote the current figure. CiteScore is free at Elsevier's Scopus sources page.
- What is a good h-index for a journal?
- There is no universal threshold. A journal's h-index rises with the number of papers and the years it has published, so compare journals of similar size, age and field, and look at mean citedness or citations per work as well.
- What does 2-year mean citedness mean?
- It is OpenAlex's impact-factor-style indicator: roughly the average number of citations that a journal's recent papers receive over a short window. OpenAlex does not publish the exact rules, so use it to compare journals within OpenAlex, not to quote as a JIF.
- Why does a journal say it is not fully open access when most of its articles are free?
- The open-access share counts free copies of any kind, including accepted manuscripts in repositories. The fully open-access flag is about the journal itself: whether every article is open when published.
- Why can't I find my journal?
- Try the ISSN, or fewer words of the title. A journal that is new, very small, or recently renamed may be missing or listed under its former name, and OpenAlex's coverage of non-English titles is uneven.
- How do I check whether a journal is legitimate?
- Metrics alone cannot tell you. Look for a DOAJ listing if it is open access, MEDLINE or another subject index, a named editorial board, clear peer-review and fee information, and ask your librarian. A missing flag is a reason to check, not proof of a problem.