Metrics & Impact Factor Policy

Researchers rely on journal metrics to decide where to publish, so a wrong or misleading metric can do real harm. This page sets out exactly what Directive Publications does and does not claim about its journals.

Our position on the Journal Impact Factor

The Journal Impact Factor is calculated by Clarivate and published only in Journal Citation Reports. None of our journals is listed in Journal Citation Reports, so none of our journals has a Journal Impact Factor. We do not claim, display or imply one on this website — not on the home page, not on journal pages and not on article pages.

If you see an "impact factor" quoted for one of our journals, it is not a Clarivate Journal Impact Factor. You can confirm this yourself by searching the journal's title or ISSN in Journal Citation Reports.

Metrics we never claim

• Alternative "impact factor" scores issued by ranking services that are not based on a recognised citation database.
• Logos or names of indexing databases our journals are not included in.
• Acceptance rates, citation counts or rankings that cannot be checked against data anyone can see.

Indexing claims

Our journals are not indexed in PubMed, PubMed Central, MEDLINE, Scopus, Web of Science or DOAJ, and we do not claim that they are. What we do provide:

• Crossref membership — Directive Publications is Crossref member 29803 (DOI prefix 10.52338).
• Open metadata — article metadata is available through OAI-PMH and JATS XML, which supports discovery in services such as Google Scholar and OpenAlex.
• Open licence — articles are published open access under CC BY 4.0.

See Indexing, Discovery & Archiving for details.

How to check any metric you see

1. Journal Impact Factor: search the journal's title or ISSN in Clarivate's Journal Citation Reports.
2. Indexing: search the journal's title or ISSN directly in the database concerned — for example PubMed, Scopus or DOAJ — rather than relying on a logo.
3. Journal identity: look up the ISSN on the ISSN Portal and compare it with the ISSN shown on the journal's page on this website.

Reporting a wrong metric

If you see a metric or indexing claim about one of our journals that does not match this policy, on any website, please tell us through our contact page so that we can have it corrected.

See also our Publisher FAQ.

Last reviewed: 2 November 2026.