In a previous post, we discussed the Journal Impact Factor (JIF). The Journal Impact Factor might be a key consideration you have when it comes time to decide where to publish your research. But, I would like to ask the question, should it be?  I’m going to give you my thoughts as a former professor, a grant reviewer, a journal article reviewer, and someone who has been publishing for over 20 years.

Let’s start with five reasons that you should not care about Journal Impact Factor. The first one is that your research results are the same no matter which journal they’re published in. If your research is strong, people are going to find it. These days with Google Scholar, Web of Science, and Scopus, if you put the right keywords in your article, the right people are going to find it. And it’s the same work if it’s published in one journal or the other. So, in that regard, it really doesn’t matter where you publish, so you shouldn’t worry about Journal Impact Factor. Just get it out into the public domain and let the other researchers in your field decide how important it is by whether they cite it or not.

 

Reason number two is that Journal Impact Factors are average citations for all the citable items in that journal over the prior two years. Impact Factors don’t say anything about an individual article’s citation rates, as discussed in the previous post on the definition and the calculation of Journal Impact Factor. There is no guarantee that publishing in a high Impact Factor journal will get you a lot of citations, so don’t worry about the Impact Factor, worry about the content of your paper.

 

Reason number three: some fields just don’t have high Impact Factor journals. Maybe the highest Impact Factor journal in your particular area of research is 3, 4 or 5. Why worry about the distinction between an Impact Factor of 1.5 and 3; it’s really not that much different. If you’re in a field where there are high impact journals then maybe this reason doesn’t apply to you, but for those of you that are in fields where there just are not high Impact Factor journals, obviously you don’t need to worry about Impact Factor as a as one of the considerations for where you publish.

 

Reason number four that you should not worry about Impact Factor is because you can waste a lot of time trying to get into high impact journals. I saw on Twitter just the other day somebody was talking about a friend of theirs that had had a paper under review for three years and then it got rejected. After three years of being in review in a high Impact Factor journal, with multiple rounds of feedback and going back and forth with the reviewers and the editors, in the end the journal rejected it. That’s three years of time that that paper is not present in the literature influencing the field and having an impact. If they had just published it in a lower Impact Factor journal where it’s probably easier to get in, it probably would have gone faster. You can have a strategy where you go for the highest Impact Factor journal, and if it gets rejected you go for the next level and if it gets rejected you go for the next one, but you can spend a lot of time doing that. And ask yourself, is it worth it?

 

Reason number five: for journals where there is an Open Access option or the journal itself is Open Access, the high Impact Factor journals tend to be very expensive. Compared to the mid-tier and low Impact Factor journals, they cost a lot more money. Is it worth spending all that money just to publish in a high Impact Factor journal? You make up your own mind.

 

(Take a look at this other post about other metrics besides the Journal Impact Factor.)

 

How about the five reasons you should care about Journal Impact Factor? The first one is that the higher Impact Factor journals tend to be more selective. They have a review process that more highly scrutinizes the submissions, and so if you get your paper into that high Impact Factor journal it shows your colleagues that you have cleared a certain high hurdle. It’s kind of an endorsement of the community that your research is worthy of that high level of scrutiny.

 

The second reason that you should care about Impact Factor is that Impact Factor translates to prestige. When you as a researcher are being evaluated by hiring committees, by peer reviewers, by grant reviewers, by the promotion and tenure committee, etc., they are going to look at the Journal Impact Factor of the journals that you have published in, and they are going to assign some value to you as a researcher based on that number. Now, I’m not saying it should be done, as discussed in the previous post that is a misuse of Journal Impact Factor. To evaluate an individual researcher, the h-index is a much better indicator. But we have to look at how reviewers are actually using it, not how it should be used.

 

Reason number three is that research in higher Impact Factor journals is considered to be more credible by most researchers, and also by reporters that write science journalism and report on new publications and by hiring committees etc. Since it’s considered to be more credible, if you want your work to have more impact and get cited more often, it might be a good idea to go for that higher Impact Factor journal.

 

Reason number four is that it increases the chances of your paper being read and being cited. Now these higher Impact Factor journals tend to have higher readership, and just by the definition of Journal Impact Factor they have higher citation rates. I did talk about how citation rates across the individual articles are not uniform, and publishing in the high Impact Factor journal is no guarantee that you’ll get more citations, but it is likely that you will get more reads and more citations, because people do tend to quickly find articles in these higher Impact Factor journals. They are more likely to read these journals and talk about them in journal club and cite the work from the higher Impact Factor journals.

 

And that brings me to point number five. We just need to face reality. Even though the Journal Impact Factor should not be used in these ways, it is it is used by people to evaluate you as a researcher, and to evaluate your article in terms of its credibility and quality. Again, I’m not saying it should be that way, but since it is, we have to deal with that reality.

 

So my overall answer to the question of should you care about Journal Impact Factor is: yes, you should. You should take that as one of the factors that comes into you deciding on a target journal, and it should be a highly weighted factor. I’m not saying that you should only go for top end journals every time, but if you’re going to go for a lower impact journal, make it a conscious decision. There are a lot of factors that go into deciding where you’re going to publish. I’m not saying you should only go for top end journals, but do keep in mind that the position in the hierarchy of journals within that category is going to affect the impact of your work. That’s just the way it is in science today.

 

How important is Journal Impact Factor to you? Leave a comment below.

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