Reviewed August 2026 against Clarivate’s Journal Citation Reports, the NLM Catalog, and USDA Economic Research Service data.

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Agronomy for Sustainable Development Impact Factor: The Number, the Trend, and How to Check It

Agronomy for Sustainable Development carries a Journal Impact Factor of 8.2 in the Journal Citation Reports edition Clarivate released on 17 June 2026, which is built on 2025 citation data. The prior release put it at 6.7, and the one before that at 6.4, according to the impact-factor series compiled at BioxBio. The journal is indexed as Agron Sustain Dev, print ISSN 1774-0746, online ISSN 1773-0155, published by Springer Nature out of France on behalf of INRAE.

That is the answer most people arrive looking for. What follows is the part an AI summary will not hand you: the full 13-year series, a side-by-side against the journals researchers actually weigh it against, the specific reasons this particular number jumped 1.5 points in one release, and a repeatable method for pulling a fresher figure than the one printed here. Because JCR reissues every June, any impact factor you read on any page — including this one — has a shelf life of about twelve months.

Journal Record at a Glance

Title, abbreviation and ISSN come from the NLM Catalog and the ISSN Portal; the founding history is documented on Wikipedia’s journal entry. Those four fields do not change from year to year. The impact factor does.

What the 8.2 Actually Counts

The Journal Impact Factor is a two-year ratio, nothing more. Clarivate defines it as the citations recorded in the JCR year to items the journal published in the two preceding years, divided by the number of citable items published across those same two years. So the 8.2 figure means: citations logged during 2025 to Agronomy for Sustainable Development papers from 2023 and 2024, over the count of citable 2023–2024 papers.

Three things follow from that formula, and they explain most of the confusion around this journal’s number.

• The denominator is small and the journal is bimonthly. Six issues a year means a modest citable-item count, so a handful of heavily cited papers moves the ratio hard. The 2021 spike to 7.832 and the drop back to 6.4 for 2023 are the signature of a small denominator, not a change in editorial standards.
• Review articles inflate the ratio wherever they appear. Clarivate counts citations to reviews in the numerator. A journal that publishes syntheses of a fast-moving field accumulates citations faster per item than one publishing single-site field trials.
• The distribution is skewed, so the mean is a poor description. Clarivate itself warns that “citation frequencies for individual articles are quite varied” and that the metric should be used with informed peer review, never on its own for tenure or hiring. The University of Wisconsin–Madison research metrics guide adds that JIFs skew toward English-language and U.S. journals, do not exclude self-citations, and that “what qualifies as a ‘good’ JIF differs by field.”

That last point has an institutional backstop. The San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment, drafted at the American Society for Cell Biology meeting on 16 December 2012, states plainly: do not use journal-based metrics as a surrogate for the quality of individual articles, or in hiring, promotion, or funding decisions. If you are choosing where to submit, the 8.2 is a useful signal of readership and reach. If you are being evaluated on it, DORA is the document to cite back.

A Four-Step Check That Works Every June

Every impact factor on the open web is a copy of a paywalled database, and copies rot. This checklist does not expire. Run it whenever you need the live figure.

1. Confirm the journal is still indexed. Search the title on the Web of Science Master Journal List, which is free. If a journal has been delisted for citation manipulation, it will not carry a JIF in the next release regardless of what aggregator sites still show.
2. Open Journal Citation Reports through your library. JCR is the only source of record. Most U.S. land-grant university libraries and USDA National Agricultural Library patrons have access. Note both the JIF and the JIF without journal self-citations — JCR reports both, and aggregators almost never do.
3. Read the quartile, not the raw number. The JCR 2026 release covers 22,643 journals across 254 categories, with 521 journals receiving a JIF for the first time. A 6.2 in a small category can outrank an 8.2 in a crowded one. Q1 means top 25% of the category; that comparison travels across fields, the raw ratio does not.
4. Write down the data year, not the release year. “Impact factor 2025” almost always means the 2025 data year, published June 2026. Half the disagreement online about this journal’s score is two people quoting adjacent releases.

Farmonaut’s earlier edition of this page records the figures as they stood in the prior release cycle, which is useful if you need to reconstruct what a citation or grant application would have referenced at that time.

How It Compares With the Journals Researchers Weigh Against It

Three titles come up repeatedly in the same searches: this journal, Elsevier’s Agricultural Systems, and MDPI’s Agronomy. They are not interchangeable, and the impact factor is the least interesting difference between them.

The two Springer and Elsevier series are drawn from the BioxBio compilations for Agron Sustain Dev and Agricultural Systems. MDPI’s Agronomy was established in 2011 and received its first JIF of 1.419; its 3.4 for the 2024 data year is documented on the journal’s Wikipedia entry, and the 4.1 for the 2025 data year is stated on MDPI’s own journal page, which is publisher-reported rather than independently indexed. Verify all three in JCR before quoting them in a submission cover letter.

If you searched “development impact factor”

That phrase is ambiguous, and the ambiguity is worth resolving before you cite anything. Dozens of indexed journals carry “Development” in the title across agriculture, economics and environmental science, and they sit in entirely different JCR categories with entirely different citation norms. Search the exact title string on the Master Journal List first, note the ISSN, then look that ISSN up in JCR. Matching on ISSN rather than title is the only reliable step here — several titles differ by a single word.

Work Out an Impact Factor From Raw Counts

If you have the citation and article counts in front of you — from JCR, Scopus, or a departmental report — this reproduces the Clarivate arithmetic and shows what self-citations are doing to the result.

Assumptions: “citable items” means articles and reviews as Clarivate classifies them, which is narrower than total published documents. The calculator excludes editorials, letters and corrections only to the extent you leave them out of the denominator yourself. It does not model early-access dating, category normalisation, or the Journal Citation Indicator. Default values are placeholders, not this journal’s figures.

What "Agronomy for Sustainable Development" Looks Like Off the Page

The journal's scope — cropping systems studied in their environmental and social context rather than yield in isolation — maps onto a measurable set of U.S. field practices. Those practices have hard adoption numbers, and the numbers are less flattering than the citation trend.

U.S. cropland planted to cover crops rose from 15,390,674 acres in 2017 to 17,985,831 acres in 2022, a 17% increase, according to a USDA Economic Research Service chart published 16 April 2024 using Census of Agriculture data. That is 4.7% of total cropland. Maryland leads on rate of adoption, which ERS attributes to Chesapeake Bay water-quality programmes; Texas posted the largest proportional gain, over 50%. The Census runs on a five-year cycle, so the next comparable national figure comes from the 2027 Census, released around early 2029 — check the ERS chart series for the update rather than assuming these acres still hold.

Precision technology, the second pillar of sustainable-intensification research, shows the same pattern of real but partial uptake. USDA ERS, drawing on the Agricultural Resource Management Survey and published 15 August 2023, put variable-rate technology at 37.4% of planted corn acres in 2016, up from 11.5% in 2005; 25.3% of soybean acres in 2018; 22.7% of cotton acres in 2019; 18.8% of winter wheat acres in 2017; and 13.9% of sorghum acres in 2019. Guidance systems ran ahead of VRT, at 58.4% of corn acres in 2016 and 54.5% of soybean acres in 2018. Adoption skews hard to scale: 73% of the largest corn farms used guidance in 2016 against 10% of the smallest.

The gap between a Q1 citation record and 4.7% cover-crop coverage is the honest summary of the field: the science is well cited and thinly deployed. Journals track the first half. Census and ARMS data track the second.

Turning Published Agronomy Into Field Measurements

Most of what this literature recommends — cover crop timing, variable-rate nitrogen, residue retention, irrigation scheduling — requires field-level measurement before and after. Farmonaut supplies that measurement layer from satellite imagery, so a practice tested in a journal paper can be tracked on a specific block.

Multispectral vegetation and moisture indices are available through our web, Android, and iOS apps.

• Emissions accounting. Our carbon footprinting solution pairs satellite observation with activity data for operations reporting against buyer or regulatory requirements.
• Programmatic access. Research groups and agtech developers can pull imagery-derived indices through the Farmonaut API, documented in the developer docs.
• Chain of custody. Blockchain-based product traceability records origin claims that sustainability certifications increasingly require.
• Machinery and logistics. Fleet management tools reduce idle time and fuel burn across equipment.
• Lending and insurance. Satellite verification supports crop loan and insurance workflows for institutions underwriting acreage.
• Large holdings and forestry. The Agro Admin app handles estate-scale monitoring across many parcels.

Water is the constraint that shows up in the largest share of this journal's applied papers. Index-based irrigation scheduling and the wider set of water management strategies depend on frequent revisit imagery rather than point sensors alone.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the impact factor of Agronomy for Sustainable Development?

8.2 in the JCR edition released 17 June 2026, computed from 2025 citation data. The preceding release reported 6.7, and the one before that 6.4.

What is the abbreviation for Agronomy for Sustainable Development?

The NLM title abbreviation is Agron Sustain Dev; the ISO 4 form used by most reference managers is Agron. Sustain. Dev. Some author guidelines shorten it to ASD in running text, but the ISO 4 form is what belongs in a reference list.

Is it a Q1 journal?

Yes, in its JCR agronomy category. Quartile is assigned per category and can differ between the categories a journal is listed in, so confirm which category the quartile you are quoting refers to.

Why does the number differ across websites?

Three causes, in order of frequency: the site is quoting the release year rather than the data year; the site has not refreshed since the previous June; or the site is quoting CiteScore, a Scopus metric with a four-year citation window, rather than the two-year JCR impact factor. They are not comparable.

How does it compare with Agricultural Systems?

Agricultural Systems sat at 6.2 for the 2025 data year and 6.1 for 2024, a much flatter line. Its scope is systems modelling and farming-systems analysis; Agronomy for Sustainable Development leans toward agroecological field research and syntheses.

Should the impact factor decide where I submit?

Use it for reach, not for merit. Clarivate advises pairing it with informed peer review, and DORA advises against using journal metrics to judge individual papers or people. Fit of scope, time to first decision, and whether your intended readers actually browse the journal matter more for a single manuscript.

The Part Worth Bookmarking

The 8.2 will be stale by next June. The method will not: confirm indexing on the Master Journal List, pull the figure from JCR itself, read the quartile alongside the raw ratio, and record the data year rather than the release year. Run those four steps and you will always have a number you can defend in a grant application or a promotion file — which is more than any single figure quoted on a web page can offer.

And if you are reading this journal to change what happens on ground rather than what appears in a bibliography, the measurements that matter are the ones from your own fields. That is where satellite monitoring earns its place: it turns a published practice into a before-and-after you can actually see.