Where the figure appears on tandfonline.com
Open the journal’s homepage on tandfonline.com rather than an article page. Journal-level metrics sit on the journal itself, usually under a “Journal metrics” heading or a metrics tab alongside aims and scope, editorial board and instructions for authors.
What you find there typically includes the Journal Impact Factor where the journal has one, the five-year impact factor, and CiteScore — and many Taylor & Francis journals also publish usage figures and review-speed data such as time to first decision. These are different measurements from different sources, not variations of one number.
Note the year attached to each figure. Metrics are republished annually, and a page can sit between releases. The year is part of the number; a figure quoted without it cannot be checked.
tandfonline.com is a platform, not a journal. Each title on it carries its own metrics — there is no platform-wide impact factor.
Verify it where it is produced
A publisher republishes metrics it did not generate. The Journal Impact Factor is produced by Clarivate and released each year in the Journal Citation Reports, drawn from the Web of Science Core Collection. CiteScore is produced by Elsevier from Scopus data over a different window. SJR comes from SCImago, again from Scopus.
For the impact factor, the authoritative check is the Journal Citation Reports. Clarivate’s Master Journal List is free to search and will confirm whether a title is in the Core Collection and which collection it sits in — SCIE, SSCI, AHCI or ESCI — which is the fact most assessment panels actually ask for.
Search by ISSN, not by title. Journal names are long, similar and occasionally imitated; the ISSN on the journal’s own page resolves all of it in one step.
A journal with no impact factor is not a weak journal
The portfolio is mixed, as every large publisher’s is. Some titles are in the Science Citation Index Expanded or the Social Sciences Citation Index and carry a Journal Impact Factor; some are in the Emerging Sources Citation Index; some are covered by Scopus and not Web of Science; some are covered by neither and are perfectly respectable within their field. Routledge titles — Routledge is a Taylor & Francis imprint, and its journals appear on the same platform — are heavily represented in the humanities and social sciences, where citation-based metrics mean less than they do in the sciences.
Field matters more than the number. An impact factor in a humanities or mathematics category is not comparable to one in a biomedical category, because citation behaviour differs between disciplines. Comparing the raw figures across fields produces a conclusion that is simply wrong.
If what you actually need is a quartile, that is a rank within a subject category and is generally not shown on the journal page. Our page on checking a journal’s quartile sets out how to find it, and which of the competing quartile systems you are being asked about.
What to do with the number once you have it
Use it to judge whether a journal is a realistic target in your own field, by comparing it with other journals in the same subject category — never across categories, and never against a figure you have not year-stamped.
Do not read it as a statement about your paper. The impact factor is a journal-level citation average over a two-year window; it says nothing about how any individual article in that journal will be received or cited, which is why many funders and universities now discourage its use in assessing individual work.
And treat metrics you do not recognise with suspicion. Figures with names built to resemble the Journal Impact Factor are fabrications with no standing at any recognised index — a problem on obscure journal websites rather than on an established publisher’s platform, but worth knowing how to spot wherever you meet it.