According to the "2011 Journal Citation Reports" (JCR) published by Thomson Reuters, Elsevier saw 58% of its journal Impact Factors increase from 2010 to 2011, which mirrored the overall trend - 54% of other journals also increased. 

Impact Factor helps evaluate a journal's impact compared to others in the same field by measuring the frequency with which recent articles in a journal have been cited in a particular year - that, in turn, helps funding groups evaluating grant proposals to establish a metric for how valuable a researcher's work is to the broad science world. The 2011 Impact Factor takes into account citations in 2011 to papers published in 2009 and 2010.

Despite some complaints from scientists in 2011, Elsevier remains the place to be - its journals are at the top in 57 subject categories and almost half of Elsevier's 1,600 journals are in the top 10% of their subject category.188 journals are in the top 3%.

The Lancet rose from 33.633 to 38.278, remaining the second-highest ranked journal in the Medicine, General&Internal category, while The Lancet Infectious Diseases and The Lancet Neurology retained their number one rankings in their respective categories. 

Cell, with an Impact Factor of 32.403, continues to be the top primary research journal in the Cell Biology and Biochemistry & Molecular Biology subject categories. Cell Stem Cell, with an Impact Factor of 25.421, had the highest percentage growth in citations in its field. 

 Martin Tanke, Managing Director Journals at Elsevier, said "We value these results as they are an acknowledgement of the excellent performance by the authors, reviewers and editors we work with. In addition, we believe these outcomes are the result of our continuous focus on quality. It remains important however to note that the Impact Factor is just one perspective on a journal's quality and influence. We will continue to invest time and resources into quality enhancing initiatives such as increased support and enhancement of the peer review process to speed up review times, and further innovations on the publishing process to deliver faster publication for our authors."