Q1 Doesn't Mean Quality: What Quartile Rankings Actually Tell You

A paper lands in a Q1 journal and the celebration is automatic — the advisor is pleased, the CV line looks strong, the tenure file gets a little heavier. There's a reasonable assumption baked into that celebration: that "top 25% of the field" means rigorously reviewed, carefully edited, trustworthy work. That assumption is only partly true, and the gap between it and reality is bigger than most researchers realize, especially once you start comparing what the metric measures against what people assume it measures.

What a quartile ranking actually measures

Quartile rankings sort journals within a subject category into four bands — Q1 is the top 25% by citation impact, Q2 the next 25%, and so on down to Q4. The two major systems, Clarivate's Journal Citation Reports and Scimago's SJR, both calculate this from citation counts: how often articles in a journal get cited, weighted and windowed slightly differently depending on the system. That's the entire input. A quartile ranking says nothing directly about how carefully a journal vets submissions, how many reviewers actually read a given paper, or how the editor handles a borderline case. It's a popularity metric dressed up as a quality metric, and the dressing is convincing enough that almost nobody checks underneath it.

The retraction data that should give everyone pause

Here's the part that tends to surprise people: a 2024 analysis of two decades of retracted papers connected to Indian research institutions found that the largest share of retractions — 34 percent — came from Q1 journals, more than from Q2 (23.3 percent), Q3 (12.2 percent), or even Q4 (14.9 percent). If quartile ranking tracked quality the way the CV-line celebration assumes, retractions should skew toward the bottom of the distribution, not the top.

Animated chart showing the share of retractions by journal quartile, with Q1 highest at 34 percent

There's a structural reason this happens rather than it being some failure unique to Q1 journals. High-citation journals in a given category also tend to be high-volume journals — they receive far more submissions than smaller, lower-ranked outlets, which means more total papers moving through the pipeline and, mechanically, more total opportunities for something to slip through, get rushed, or get missed under submission pressure. Being cited often and being reviewed thoroughly are correlated in a general sense, but they're not the same axis, and high submission volume can put real strain on the second one even at journals doing everything else right.

The category problem nobody mentions

Quartiles only make sense relative to the other journals in the same subject category, and categories vary enormously in size and competitiveness. A Q1 placement in a narrow, sparsely populated category can be a meaningfully lower bar than a Q1 placement in a category with hundreds of competing journals. This is also where "quartile shopping" creeps in — some journals are indexed under multiple subject categories specifically because their citation profile clears the Q1 bar in a smaller, less competitive category even when it wouldn't in a larger, more obvious one. None of that shows up when someone glances at "Q1" on a CV or a journal's marketing page; it only shows up if you go check which category, and how many journals are actually in it.

A quick way to check the category problem yourself

Before trusting a "Q1" label at face value, it takes about two minutes to see whether it means what it implies. Look the journal up on Scimago or in the Journal Citation Reports and check two things: which subject category it's ranked under, and how many other journals exist in that category. A Q1 ranking among 300 competing journals in a broad category is a different achievement than a Q1 ranking among 15 journals in a narrow one. If a journal appears in several categories, it's also worth noting whether its quartile is consistent across them or whether it only clears Q1 in the smallest, least competitive one — that inconsistency is itself useful information about how meaningful the headline ranking actually is.

What quartile data has never tried to capture

None of this means quartile rankings are useless — they're a legitimate, if narrow, signal of a journal's standing within its category, and ignoring them entirely would be its own mistake. The actual problem is using them as a stand-in for everything else you'd want to know before submitting: whether the editor is responsive, whether reviewers engage seriously with the manuscript or phone it in, whether a fee shows up after acceptance that wasn't obvious going in, and whether the review process feels rigorous or more like a formality on the way to a near-certain acceptance. A citation-based metric was never built to measure any of that, and treating it as if it does is exactly the gap that lets stories like the Q1 retraction data above happen and then surprise everyone.

Pairing the metric with the experience

The fix isn't to distrust quartile rankings — it's to stop treating them as sufficient on their own. Sciverdict was built around that exact pairing: alongside the citation metrics you'd get from JCR or Scimago, you can read what verified authors actually experienced submitting to a given journal — whether the review felt thorough, how editors communicated, and what, if anything, went sideways. A Q1 journal with a track record of rushed, superficial reviews and a Q2 journal with a reputation for genuinely rigorous feedback are two very different bets, even though only one of them photographs well on a CV.

Before your next submission, look up the journal's quartile the normal way, and then look up what real authors say happened once they got there. Register free on Sciverdict to check both, and to add your own submission once you have one worth reporting — quartile rankings will keep telling half the story on their own, and the other half only exists because researchers choose to write it down.

References

1. Sharma, Kiran. "Two Decades of Scientific Misconduct in India: Retraction Reasons and Journal Quality among Inter-country and Intra-country Institutional Collaboration." arXiv, 2024.
2. Scimago Journal & Country Rank. "SJR — Help."
3. Clarivate. "Quartile — InCites Glossary."