ACS Catalysis Impact Factor

The impact factor tells you that ACS Catalysis papers are cited at a strong rate within chemistry. The stable five-year JIF (13.3) confirms this is not a journal riding a temporary citation spike. The metric reflects durable community attention from the catalysis field.

The 150,094 total cites figure is very substantial, reflecting a journal that publishes around 1,600 papers per year and has built a commanding position in catalysis since its launch in 2011. For a journal with roughly 14 years of history, reaching this total citation volume demonstrates rapid field adoption.

For catalysis researchers: 13.1 places ACS Catalysis in the top tier of dedicated catalysis journals, well above Journal of Catalysis (6.5), Applied Catalysis B (21.1 but broader environmental scope), and Catalysis Science & Technology (4.2). Only Nature Catalysis (44.6) sits dramatically above it in the pure catalysis space.

The JIF has been remarkably stable, fluctuating only between 12.9 and 13.7 over five years. That stability is a strong signal. It means the journal's citation performance is structurally embedded, not volatile. Use 13.1 for planning.

ACS Catalysis editors want catalysis work that advances the field meaningfully. The editorial bar covers heterogeneous, homogeneous, enzymatic, and bio-inspired catalysis. Specifically:

• A real catalytic advance, not just a new substrate scope with an existing system
• Enough mechanistic insight to explain why the catalysis works
• Competitive benchmarking against existing catalytic methods
• Relevance to the broader catalysis community, not just one narrow reaction class
• Practical considerations like turnover numbers, selectivity, and scalability
• Computational and experimental integration where appropriate

What usually fails: purely computational studies without experimental validation, incremental substrate scope expansions of known catalysts, and papers where the catalysis is secondary to a synthetic methods story.

Submit if:

• the paper has a clear catalytic advance with good mechanistic support
• the work matters to the broad catalysis community across subdisciplines
• benchmarking is thorough and honest against the state of the art
• the catalysis is the primary contribution, not a supporting element
• heterogeneous, homogeneous, or biocatalysis results meet the field standard

Think twice if:

• Nature Catalysis is a realistic target (try there first if the work has broad conceptual reach)
• the catalysis angle is secondary to a synthetic methods story (JACS may be better)
• the main audience is really organic chemistry or materials science rather than catalysis
• the advance is incremental optimization of a known catalytic system
• Applied Catalysis B or an environmental catalysis journal would better serve the application angle

Many catalysis papers can plausibly go to either ACS Catalysis or JACS. The trade-off:

ACS Catalysis (IF 13.1) offers a dedicated catalysis audience. Reviewers and editors are catalysis specialists who evaluate the catalytic advance on its own terms. The paper gets read by the people who care most about catalysis.

JACS (IF 15.6) offers broader chemistry visibility and a higher JIF. But the paper competes for attention with work from all of chemistry, and the editorial bar is focused on broad chemical significance rather than catalytic depth.

For work that is deeply catalytic and may not have broad enough chemistry appeal for JACS, ACS Catalysis is the stronger choice. For work where the catalysis has implications across multiple areas of chemistry, JACS may provide better visibility.

In our pre-submission review work with manuscripts targeting ACS Catalysis, three patterns generate the most consistent desk-rejection and early-rejection outcomes.

Catalyst novelty without mechanistic insight. ACS Catalysis' published editorial scope explicitly requires that papers provide "new insight into how catalytic reactions proceed while providing rationale for the observed reactivity and selectivity." Papers that present a new catalyst ligand, support, or metal combination with good conversion and yield data but without explaining why the catalyst performs as it does face rejection. "Here's a new catalyst system and it works" is not ACS Catalysis material. The catalytic insight, the mechanistic explanation for the observed selectivity, the rationale for why this combination of components produces the observed reactivity, is the primary contribution, and the catalyst performance data is the evidence for it. New catalysts that outperform existing systems without establishing a mechanistic principle belong in more applied venues.

Yield-only reporting without kinetic characterization. ACS Catalysis guidelines state directly: "characterization of catalytic performance with rates such as turnover frequencies (TOFs) under kinetically controlled conditions is expected" for heterogeneous and molecular catalysis papers. Papers that report catalytic performance only as product yields at extended reaction times, without kinetic data establishing the rate laws, TOF values, and kinetic orders, are returned as methodologically incomplete. This is a hard documented requirement, not a reviewer preference. Before submitting, the paper should include TOF data at initial conversion, kinetic order analysis, and where appropriate, Arrhenius parameters. Optimization tables showing conversion at 24 hours across a substrate scope are supporting data, not primary mechanistic evidence.

Single-reaction case studies without broader field implications. The journal assesses whether papers have "general implications" beyond the specific catalytic system studied. A paper demonstrating an interesting catalytic transformation with good yields and some mechanistic support but confined to one reaction type, one substrate class, or one narrow application without discussing what the finding reveals about catalysis more broadly faces rejection for insufficient significance. ACS Catalysis spans homogeneous, heterogeneous, and biocatalysis; papers that speak only to specialist practitioners in one sub-area without articulating the cross-cutting principle need either broader scope experiments or explicit framing of why the finding advances understanding in a way that generalizes. A ACS Catalysis submission readiness check can assess whether the manuscript's mechanistic content and breadth of implication meet ACS Catalysis' specific bar.

Last verified: March 2026 against Clarivate JCR 2024 data.

Understanding the catalysis publishing landscape helps with submission strategy:

• Nature Catalysis (IF 44.6): field-defining catalysis, ultra-selective
• ACS Catalysis (IF 13.1): ACS's dedicated catalysis flagship
• Applied Catalysis B (IF 21.1): environmental and energy catalysis
• Chinese Journal of Catalysis (IF 17.7): rising Asian catalysis venue
• Journal of Catalysis (IF 6.5): long-established Elsevier catalysis journal
• Catalysis Today (IF 5.3): broad catalysis with timely topics
• Catalysis Science & Technology (IF 4.2): RSC's catalysis journal

ACS Catalysis sits firmly in the second tier after Nature Catalysis, ahead of the established but lower-JIF specialty venues. For most catalysis researchers, it represents the highest-impact dedicated catalysis journal they can realistically target.

• Whether the mechanistic depth satisfies ACS Catalysis reviewers
• Whether the substrate scope or application range is broad enough
• Whether the work belongs in a broader chemistry journal instead
• How long the review process will take at ACS
• Whether the benchmarking against existing methods is competitive

A ACS Catalysis submission readiness check can help identify whether the catalysis story is framed strongly enough for this editorial bar, and whether ACS Catalysis or a broader chemistry journal is the better target.

If this page is part of a real submission decision, the adjacent questions usually matter more than the metric alone:

• ACS Catalysis submission process
• Is ACS Catalysis a good journal?
• How to avoid desk rejection at ACS Catalysis