Our impact

Your research makes a difference. That’s why maximizing its impact is important to us. 

We're here to support the superheroes making discoveries - no matter how big or small - that will enable us all to live healthy lives on a healthy planet.

Views and downloads

There is an innovator in every corner of the globe: in 2024 to date, articles published with Frontiers were viewed and downloaded 356 million times across the world, totaling more than 2.8 billion overall.

Article citations

Articles published in our journals have been cited 9.4 million times in total. And behind each of those citations is a story of inspiration and discovery.

Following the 2023 release of the Web of Science Group's Journal Citation Report (JCR 2022) and Scopus' CiteScore, 109 of the journals published by Frontiers have a Journal Impact Factor and 113 journals have a CiteScore.

Looking for the right home for your research? Browse all of our community journals

The Journal Impact Factor is the average number of citations received in the last year to articles published in the previous two years. It is measured each year by the Web of Science Group and reported in the Journal Citation Reports (JCR). The Journal Impact Factors, published in this year's report, are based on citations in 2023 for articles published in 2021 and 2022.

The CiteScore journal impact metric measures the average citations received in a four-year time window to selected documents published in the same four years. The 2023 CiteScores (released in 2024) are based on citations received to articles, reviews, conference papers, book chapters, and data papers published in 2020-2023, divided by the total number of documents published in this four-year window. CiteScore covers all journal titles in Elsevier's Scopus database and is released once a year.

Frontiers’ articles achieve international visibility with more than 252,000 mentions in major news outlets worldwide including BBC, Newsweek, Time. They have been mentioned 3.4 million times in social media channels.

They also achieved 7,000 mentions in policies and 13,000 in patents, demonstrating the real impact your research is having in the world.

Evaluating research

To benchmark the reach, influence and quality of our journals, we measure and communicate a range of indicators of our journals’ impact, including Journal Impact Factors, CiteScores, overall citation rates, aggregate views and downloads, press pick-ups, and social media mentions.

We fully support the responsible use of Journal Impact Factors, other quantitative research metrics, and innovative ways for researcher evaluation, as proposed by the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA, to which we are a signatory), the Leiden Manifesto, the Metric Tide for Responsible Metrics and the European Commission's Expert Group on Altmetrics.