Search almost any journal's name alongside "impact" and you'll run into a quartile label somewhere in the results — Q1, Q2, Q3, or Q4. These come from SCImago Journal Rank (SJR), a free, publicly available ranking system built on Scopus citation data, and they're one of the most commonly referenced ways of expressing a journal's relative standing within its field.
What SJR Actually Measures
SJR is a weighted citation metric, meaning it doesn't just count how many times a journal's papers get cited — it weighs each citation by the prestige of the citing journal, using an algorithm conceptually similar to Google's PageRank for web pages. A citation from a highly-cited, prestigious journal counts for more than a citation from an obscure one. This is meant to correct for the fact that raw citation counts can be inflated by journals in high-volume fields regardless of actual influence.
How Quartiles Are Assigned
Once every journal in a subject category has an SJR score, they're ranked from highest to lowest and split into four equal-sized groups. The top 25% of journals in that category become Q1, the next 25% become Q2, then Q3, and the bottom 25% become Q4. Because this is done separately within each subject category, a journal's quartile reflects its standing relative to other journals covering similar ground — not against every journal in existence.
Why the Category Matters as Much as the Quartile
A journal can carry different quartiles in different categories if it's classified under more than one subject area, and this isn't a contradiction — it genuinely means the journal ranks differently against different comparison groups. A journal sitting at Q2 in a broad, high-volume category might be Q1 in a narrower, more specialized one it's also classified under. Always check which category a quoted quartile refers to before treating it as a single fixed fact about a journal.
Q1 Isn't the Only "Good" Outcome
It's easy to treat Q1 as the only acceptable target and everything else as a compromise, but a Q2 journal that's a strong scope fit for your paper, has a faster and fairer review process, and reaches the right specialist readership is very often the better choice over a broadly-ranked Q1 journal your specific paper doesn't fit well. Quartile is one signal among several, not a single ranking to optimize in isolation.
Quartiles Change Over Time
SJR is recalculated annually using the latest citation data, so a journal's quartile can shift from one year to the next — sometimes because the journal's own citation performance changed, and sometimes because other journals in its category moved around it. If you're referencing a journal's quartile in a CV, grant file, or tenure document, check the current year's figure rather than relying on a number you saw previously.
Check Any Journal's Quartile Directly
Know Your Faculty's [Journal Rankings tool](/journal-rankings) shows SJR quartile alongside ABDC rating, Scopus H-index, and papers published per year for thousands of matched journals — all searchable free, with no sign-up required, right alongside the ABDC Journal Quality List 2025 data.