Every July, journal impact factors (JIFs) for the preceding year are released. 1 JIFs are eagerly anticipated as proxies for journal quality and influence (Lowry et al., 2013), although we acknowledge a longstanding countermovement that rejects such journal-level metrics and argues that only article-level quality and impact should be assessed or that suggests other impact measures (e.g. Bollen et al., 2005;Leydesdorff, 2012). 2 We also acknowledge the inherent risks associated with scientometric analysis of journal impact (cf. Clarke, 2016), especially in drawing inferences about what anyone (publisher, editor, author, or reader) might do as a result of that analysis. The most-reported JIF covers two years and was traditionally calculated as follows: JIF 2021 ð Þ¼ Citations to citable articles published in 2019 and 2020 Number of articles published in 2021In 2020, the calculation was slightly modified to include within the denominator the count of articles appearing in Early View (i.e. articles already accepted but not yet assigned to an issue) and within the numerator citations to citable articles from Early View. Editors, publishers, and scientometric researchers anticipated that this might lead to a temporary spike in JIFs. A two-year JIF favours journals that publish quickly-cited articles while a five-year JIF captures the longer-term citation impact. Thus, it would not be unreasonable to count JIFs for 10 or more years, because, in some disciplines (notably the humanities), articles take many years to build sufficient reputation to be cited. Google Scholar's h5 index is relevant here, 3 as it offers a broader view of how many well-cited papers a journal has published over a five-year period.In 2020, we noticed significant spikes in the JIFs of several leading information systems (IS) journals, both inside and outside the Association for Information Systems (AIS) basket of eight (AIS-8) premier journals. A moderate degree of JIF fluctuation is normal, and a few journals increase steadily year after year, but the changes in 2020 were remarkable. For example, the JIF for the Journal of Strategic Information Systems (JSIS) rose from 3.949 in 2019 to 7.838 in 2020; likewise, the JIF for Information & Organisation (I&O), rose from 3.300 to 6.300. Every other major IS journal saw significant increases. In analysing the patterns, our scope embraces 13 journals, beginning with the