What Q1 actually means
A journal’s quartile is a rank position inside one subject category, not a score. Journals in a category are ordered by a metric, and the top 25% are Q1. Clarivate publishes the exact rule for its Journal Citation Reports: if X is the journal’s rank and Y the number of journals in the category, then Z = X/Y, and Q1 is 0 < Z ≤ 0.25.
That relative definition has a consequence most authors miss. A Q1 mathematics journal and a Q1 oncology journal can differ by an order of magnitude in impact factor, because citation behaviour differs between fields. And a journal with a higher impact factor than another can sit in a *lower* quartile, if it happens to be in a more heavily-citing category.
Q1 is the top 25% of a subject category — not the top 25% of all journals, and not a synonym for a high impact factor.
There is more than one Q1
Two separate systems produce quartiles, and they disagree routinely. Clarivate’s Journal Citation Reports ranks by Journal Impact Factor within Web of Science categories. SCImago ranks by SJR — a prestige-weighted measure over a three-year window — within Scopus categories. Scopus separately publishes a CiteScore quartile, computed over four years without prestige weighting.
They disagree for three structural reasons: the metrics measure different things, the category systems are entirely different (Web of Science has 254 categories, Scopus over 300), and the journal populations differ, since a journal can be in one index and not the other. So "this journal is Q1" is an incomplete statement until you know which system, which category, and which year.
The multi-category trap
Most journals sit in more than one subject category, and hold a separate quartile in each. We counted this directly from Elsevier’s own Scopus Source List (June 2026 edition): of 30,102 active journals, 21,122 carry more than one subject classification.
SCImago’s ranking table even has a column headed "SJR Best Quartile", which reports the highest quartile a journal reaches in any of its categories. So a journal that is Q1 in one narrow category and Q3 in its main field will legitimately display "Q1" — with no dishonesty involved. This is why "this journal is Q1" and "this journal is Q1 in my field" are different claims, and why evaluation committees increasingly ask for the second.
70% of active Scopus journals sit in more than one subject category, each with its own quartile.
How we work on a Q1 target
We start by telling you whether Q1 is realistic for the manuscript you have. That is not a formality — a study whose design cannot support the claim will not clear a Q1 desk screen regardless of how it is written, and we would rather say so in week one than after two rejection cycles.
Where Q1 is reachable, the work is: matching the paper to categories where it genuinely competes rather than to the highest-ranked title we can name; verifying the journal’s current quartile at source, per category, because quartiles move every year; strengthening the methods reporting that desk screens actually check; and preparing point-by-point reviewer responses. Where Q1 is not reachable yet, we say what would make it reachable — usually more data, a tighter claim, or a different framing — and target the quartile the work can defend now.
What we will not tell you
We will not quote you a "typical Q1 acceptance rate", because no reliable public dataset exists. Most journals never disclose one. The largest study of the question — Sugimoto and colleagues, across 1,301 journals matched to Journal Citation Reports — found the correlation between impact factor and acceptance rate to be weak, between −0.06 and −0.15. Discipline mattered far more than quartile: median acceptance rates ranged from 6.5% in accounting to 58.9% in psychology and psychiatry.
We also will not guarantee acceptance in a Q1 journal, or any journal. That decision belongs to editors and reviewers. A service that guarantees it is either misleading you or planning to submit your work somewhere you would not want it.