Vegetation Classification and Survey (VCS): new journal metrics released

Posted on by

Prepared by Jürgen Dengler (on behalf of VCS Chief Editor)

Positive development of the CiteScore from 2022 to 2025, including the forecast for next year (as of June 2026)

In June 2026, both the Web of Science and Scopus released their new journal metrics. We are happy to announce that after the phenomenal first Journal Impact Factor (JIF) of 3.0 last year, this year’s JIF with 2.7 is only minimally lower. One should note that JIFs of small journals are inherently fluctuating as they are calculated for a two-year time window only, thus the minimal decrease should not be of much concern. By contrast, our CiteScore continued its strong and monotonous increase and has now reached 4.7, while the CiteScoreTracker (i.e. the forecast for the CiteScore next year) is currently already at 5.3 (see figure). The more constant development of the CiteScore compared to the JIF can be attributed to the fact that the former integrates over four years. VCS is now in Q2 of the Web of Science and in Q1 in Scopus (across all disciplines in which the journal is listed).

Given this good news from the bibliometric perspective, we would like to encourage you to continue submitting your best classification papers to VCS and to screen recent VCS issues for articles relevant to your work and worth to be cited.