Science's 2026 Journal Metrics Score is 20.0, ranking Q1 in Molecular Biology and 3 other subfields. Two-year citation average from OpenAlex data, updated August 2026.
Bookmark this page — track observed submission-to-acceptance timing, FWCI and field-normalized citation data for this journal in one view.
Journal Metrics Score 2026 · 2021–2024 window citedness 20.15.
Not available — there are not enough recent PubMed records with both received and accepted dates.
No journal-level APC is available in the current OpenAlex snapshot. Cost is excluded from scoring.
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Each spoke is a 0–100 percentile within a comparable journal cohort—not a percentage grade or a single black-box rating.
3604 of 9,697 works · same type, year & subfield
1899 works · same type, year & subfield
Below field-year expectation
of 22,069 topic-associated OpenAlex sources by lifetime output
FWCI compares papers with the same publication year, type, and field. 1.0 is the world average; above 1.0 is above expectation. This journal's median is 0.89, so its typical recent paper runs about 11% below its field benchmark.
37.2% of recent papers rank in the global top 10% after field normalization. This is easier to compare across specialties than raw citation totals.
Volume is separated from citation accumulation so newer papers are not presented as weaker simply because they are newer.
OpenAlex source records · 2016–2025
9,697 OpenAlex works · 2021–2024
OpenAlex topics show research communities; MeSH keeps the medical taxonomy recognizable.
Select a MeSH signal to see how much Science publishes on it, from PubMed counts for the last five complete years.
Candidates share at least one OpenAlex subfield (or field, if too few do) with this journal's main research topics, ignoring generic catch-all topics, and are ordered by topic overlap, then current Journal Metrics Score.
* Cost is indicative only. APCs, taxes, waivers, and member discounts can change—always verify on the journal's official website.
| Category | Quartile |
|---|---|
| Molecular Biology | Q1 |
| Infectious Diseases | Q1 |
| Global and Planetary Change | Q1 |
| Astronomy and Astrophysics | Q1 |
Confirm the exact title and ISSNs against the publisher homepage before a high-stakes submission decision.
2026 Journal Metrics Scores for all 6 Science journals published by American Association for the Advancement of Science, highest score first. Each journal is scored separately; there is no combined score for the Science family.
Source: the current OpenAlex source record. OpenAlex works can include multiple work types. Fully Open Access is a source-level flag. Recent OA Works is summed from OpenAlex's counts_by_year series (up to the latest ten years); it is not a lifetime OA percentage. Any APC shown here is an indicative OpenAlex value—verify current charges on the journal's official website.
By Dr. Meng Zhao, Physician-Scientist · Founder, LabCat AI · Editorial policy
Science has been published weekly since 1880, today by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). Although Science and Nature are usually spoken of in the same breath, in practice they behave differently as venues. A few observations from the receiving end of many submission decisions:
A well-motivated new technique with convincing applications has historically had a reasonable home at Science. Nature tends to require the method and a landmark biological finding in the same paper.
Science publishes both Research Articles (longer, discursive) and Reports (short, single-claim). Picking the right format up front reduces one category of editorial friction — an important claim with a single experimental arc is almost always a Report.
Science's affiliation with AAAS gives it a stronger public-policy orientation. Papers where the novel finding has immediate public-health or policy implications sometimes get more traction here than at Nature's more basic-science tilt.
Nature has dozens of specialty titles to cascade to; the Science family is much smaller (Science Advances, Science Translational Medicine, Science Immunology, Science Signaling, Science Robotics). Plan your backup journal list accordingly — many Science rejections end up at non-AAAS specialty venues.
Before submitting, check the manuscript against what the editors screen for first:
If the advance mainly matters within one field, a specialty journal is usually the better first submission.
Science's 2026 Journal Metrics Score is 20.0, from the August 2026 data release. The score is a two-year citation average computed from OpenAlex (CC0) data: citations received in the most recent complete year to works published in the two prior years, divided by the number of those works.
Science's best quartile is Q1. By OpenAlex subfield: Q1 in Molecular Biology; Q1 in Infectious Diseases; Q1 in Global and Planetary Change; Q1 in Astronomy and Astrophysics. Quartiles rank journals by Journal Metrics Score within each subfield.
No. Journal Metrics computes the score independently from OpenAlex open data. Other providers use different citation databases, document types, and counting rules, so their published figures for Science will not match this score exactly. Compare journals using one source at a time.
Comparable journals include Nature, Cell, Nature Communications, and Nature Microbiology. Compare their scores, acceptance times, and costs in the recommended alternatives on this page before choosing where to submit.