International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health

• 1. Introduction

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  The International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health was launched in 2004 with a straightforward mission: to publish peer-reviewed science at the intersection of environmental health and public wellbeing. Published by MDPI, it operates as an open-access journal, meaning anyone with an internet connection can read its research without a subscription. For nearly two decades, it built up a reputation as an indexed outlet in the major citation databases that researchers rely on to track the influence of published work. Then, in February 2023, something unusual happened. A powerful gatekeeper of academic prestige made a decision that would reshape how the journal was seen across the global research community. What prompted that decision, and what does it mean for a journal to lose the metrics it spent years accumulating?

• 2. A Journal Built for Open Access

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  MDPI, the publisher behind the journal, built its model around open-access publishing, and the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health fit squarely into that approach. Readers anywhere could access the research at no cost, removing the paywalls that have long restricted scientific literature to well-funded institutions. Paul B. Tchounwou serves as the journal's editor-in-chief, overseeing a scope that spans all aspects of environmental health sciences and public health. That breadth was intentional. The field sits at a crossroads where air quality, water safety, occupational hazards, and disease prevention all converge, and the journal positioned itself to cover that full territory. By 2021, that positioning had earned the journal an impact factor of 4.614, according to the Journal Citation Reports, a figure that placed it firmly within the range that researchers and institutions track when deciding where to submit their work.

• 3. Indexing and What It Means

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  Clarivate, the company that maintains the Journal Citation Reports, also controls two of the most widely consulted citation indexes in academic publishing: the Science Citation Index Expanded and the Social Sciences Citation Index. Being listed in either carries real weight. Grant agencies, tenure committees, and university rankings often treat inclusion in these indexes as a proxy for quality. For the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, presence in those indexes translated directly into the impact factor it reported. That number, 4.614 for 2021, reflected how often other researchers cited the journal's articles within a defined window. Impact factors are not a neutral measurement. They reward volume and visibility as much as rigor, and journals that publish large numbers of articles can see their metrics shift as citation patterns change. The journal's indexing status was the foundation on which all of those metrics rested.

• 4. The February 2023 Delisting

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  In February 2023, Clarivate removed the journal from both the Science Citation Index Expanded and the Social Sciences Citation Index. The reason Clarivate gave was specific: publications that were deemed outside the scope of the journal. Scope violations are a recognized concern in academic publishing. When a journal accepts articles that fall outside its stated subject area, it can distort citation metrics and dilute the coherence of its record. Clarivate's decision was not a quiet administrative update. A delisted journal stops receiving rank metrics, which means it no longer earns an impact factor from Clarivate. That single consequence ripples outward in concrete ways: researchers who require indexed outlets for promotion, funding bodies that specify impact-factor thresholds, and institutional repositories that track output through citation databases all encounter the gap left by the delisting. The journal's editor-in-chief, Paul B. Tchounwou, remained in place, and the journal continued to publish and to be abstracted and indexed through other services.

• 5. Life After Impact Factor

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  A delisted journal does not cease to exist. The International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health continued operating as a peer-reviewed, open-access publication after February 2023, still abstracted and indexed through channels outside the Clarivate system. What changed was its relationship to the specific prestige economy that impact factors sustain. Researchers who had built citation portfolios around the journal found themselves navigating questions about how that work would be evaluated going forward. The episode sits within a broader ongoing debate about whether impact factors accurately measure scientific value or whether they create perverse incentives, pushing journals to chase citations at the cost of editorial consistency. The journal's founding year of 2004 means it accumulated nearly two decades of published research before the delisting, a body of work that remains accessible under its open-access model regardless of where it sits in Clarivate's indexes.