"Is this a Q1 journal?" is perhaps the most-heard question in journal selection — because the quartile is used as a shortcut for a journal's prestige. But what a quartile is and how it's calculated is often misunderstood. Let's be clear: a quartile is not an absolute quality stamp but a position relative to a category.
What is a quartile?
All journals in a subject category are ranked by a metric (e.g. Impact Factor or CiteScore) and split into four:
| Quartile | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Q1 | Top 25% of the category |
| Q2 | 25–50% band |
| Q3 | 50–75% band |
| Q4 | Bottom 25% |
So Q1 means "in the top quarter of journals in the category" — not an absolute IF threshold. Being Q1 in a small category differs from being Q1 in a huge one.
JCR quartile or Scopus quartile?
There are two separate systems, and they get confused:
- JCR quartile — Journal Citation Reports, based on the Impact Factor (Web of Science / Clarivate).
- Scopus quartile — based on CiteScore and SJR (Scopus / Elsevier).
The same journal can be Q2 in JCR and Q1 in Scopus due to different databases and categories. (See the separate post on the difference between the two metrics.) Verify which one applies from your institution's criteria.
Why does a journal get more than one quartile?
Because a journal can be listed in multiple subject categories. A journal may be Q1 in "Economics" and Q2 in "Business". So when you say "a Q1 journal," you should state which category it's Q1 in; picking the highest quartile is common, but hiding which category it comes from is misleading.
Where should you submit?
The quartile matters, but it's not the only criterion — and it's a journal metric; for author-level impact, you look at separate indicators like the h-index. The right target is the intersection of three things:
- Scope fit — even a Q1 journal will desk-reject a paper that doesn't fit its scope.
- Acceptance odds — the highest quartile isn't always the smartest target; be realistic.
- Category and criteria — the system your institution counts (JCR/Scopus) and the category.
When choosing the right journal, use the quartile as part of this whole. Finding which category and quartile dozens of journals sit in, one by one, is tedious; Peerfect's free journal recommendation engine puts journals that fit your scope in front of you with their quartile and index information — so you answer not just "is it Q1?" but "is it the right Q1 for my paper?"