I agree with @Dean Whitehead and like to add the following:

It depends on the committee deciding. However, if I have to make a decision, I would prefer the more cited paper regardless of the impact factor in which that article has been published.    

Reginald - an tricky one to answer. Some would argue that Impact Factor is king and, how many times the article is then cited is immaterial. On the other hand, and personally, I would argue that a well cited article in a lesser IF journal has been better received by the academic community. I would value the latter more but, for tenure, promotion, etc - then it's probably down to individual and subjective choice of the panel members. A counter-arguement again is that, an article that gets through the review process of a high impact journal, is more likely to be oft-cited. 

I agree with @Dean Whitehead and like to add the following:

It depends on the committee deciding. However, if I have to make a decision, I would prefer the more cited paper regardless of the impact factor in which that article has been published.    

number of citation is high. this refers to that an article has high reputation and attractive among readers. number of citations play among readers. Journal may have lower impact factor

Personally, I feel, higher number of citations are more significant than higher Impact Factor. This also denotes the popularity of a particular topic or paper or the number of researchers working on it.

I think that a frequently cited article trump the journal's reputation in which it is published.

In my opinion high citation rate shows the public scientific  interest on this paper and its relevance, not necessarily the scientific quality like the impact factor.

I believe the essential issue is the number of citations an article has, and also the impact factor of the journals that publish the citers` articles.

I like to prefer journals with frequently cited papers, it´s more interesting to read them first.

Not quantity, but quality of reactions to frequently cited papers should determine the academic merit of the author.  Is there any depth or substance to the reactions? Book reviews or review articles would serve as indicators.  So would treatment of the papers in other papers.

Dear Nelson,

you are completely right. But before showing scientifically reputated reactions you must read the paper because you feel interest.

Absolutely right, Hanno. It is important not to jump to conclusions about the quality of a paper before reading it yourself, no matter how good its reputation.

I think number of citation is important; and shows the quality of the paper.

However,  it can also be an important consideration as to who have cited it. If an article is cited by a more distiguished/celebrated author known for her/his pathbreaking work that may also matter. I think the journal's reputation is bound to go up when the citation is by such authors.  

Dear Nelson, that´s the point.

It is highly field-dependent, and even within a given field it is hard to give a number of citations that makes a paper influentional and/or trumps the reputation of a journal it was published in.

In maths, it may also happen that the paper is important but not too well-cited because the result is negative: for example, it is shown that something does not exist or some conjecture is disproved. 

I agree with my dear Artur that it is highly field-dependent.

it is domain dependent and also depends on the research community.

Papers in different disciplines get cited at different numbers of times. Papers in an engineering journal seem to attarct fewer citations than one in a medical journal, in general.

I think a high citation of a paper in a less well known journal still indicates it has some impact.  My most cited paper (201) was publsihed in plain journal. But through it, many people get to know me and my work.

So it seems that the increasing trend to the online digital format is altering the relationship between Impact Factor and journal citations. This is not altogether surprising when one looks at social media and how some articles are being cited. Some journals are trying to get a handle on this by using online scoring tools eg Altimetric-

http://www.altimetric.com

This then begs the question of how should the online citations be factored into a modified Impact Factor score or is it too late and the horse has bolted so to speak?

If a journal is of good quality, then number of citations will be more and our h- and i-indices improve. It is always to focus to publish our research findings in good quality/reputed journals, which is based on IPP, SNIP & SJR.

The influence of one paper that has a high number of citation is important but does not necessary reflect the quality or reputation the journal in which it is published. This is because a very good paper that have been cited frequently but it is published in a lesser-known journal which publish many less quality papers with monthly issues. In my opinion the  journal's reputation should be measured by the average number of citations per paper in the journal.

Point is  there is no rational for extending the IF of a journal to its papers, and much less to individual researchers. But unfortunately in many places journals IF is taken as a measure of the quality of the paper and its author(s). One such practice is currently being followed for recruitment and promotion in Universities following University Grants Commission (UGC) guidelines in India. Under this guide line research papers published in Journals with higher IF are are given higher marks without bothering about the citations of the paper. This marking is further wrong as because there is a single criteria for all subjects. As we all know an IF which is very high for one subject may be very low for another,,,,. As a result all of us  know what is happening...

The number of citation tells the usefulness of the article in research. The more cited the more popularity of the article. Every time the article is cited it also get publicity of the journal too. Many readers may become known to that particular journal.

I have served on a Promotion and Tenure Committee for a number of years, and my experience supoports Prithvi's point about the gradual disassociation of article quality form journal quality.  But an issue faced by committees and, presumably, Chairs and Deans doing annual evaluations, is that you frequently have to consider an article that has just been published, or possibly even just accepted.  Under these circumstances, Impact Factor or other similar means of judging the quality of the journal are, aside from your opinion of the article itself, probably the best predictors of how heavily cited the article will be.  It's not a perfect predictor (while my most-cited article is in my highest-IF journal, my second-most cited article is in a low-IF journal), but it's generally reliable.  Even in the digital age, there are a few reasons why:

- The review process.  Getting an article published in a high-IF journal typically involves more rounds of reviews, revisions, and intellectual dialog with the editors and reviewers.  It takes longer, and it's more work, but at the end the article you publish is usually a lot better than it would have been if you'd sent it to a place that published it without significant revisions.  So, on average, high IF journals have better articles, which makes them more citable.

- Browsability.  Yes, you can browse through most journals in your field with equal ease, but when you go out to look at the latest issue of a journal, how often is it a minor journal with a low IF?  If you browse all the articles on a topic across all journals in your library database, are you more likely to open the articles with journals you know?  High-IF journals are read more often, and thus cited more often.

- Respectability.  When you write a new article on a topic, you need to cite what's been done before, and in your literature review you need to discuss the current state of the literature.  That means you need to cite the articles everyone else cites, even if you disagree with them (maybe especially if you disagree with them),  to show the reader the current state of the art, and to show the reviewers that you know the current state of the art.  Yes, there are articles from low-IF journals that get cited a lot too, but the majority of the most-cited articles are in the high-IF journals.

These factors are all interconnected, of course, but they lead to a situation where the majority of cites still go to high-IF journals or the occasional "breakout" article from a low-IF journal (enough "breakout" article sin a low-IF journal, though, will increase its IF, so "breakout" articles are unlikely to become the majority.

So the journal's IF is a good predictor of future performance.  The article's citation rate is a good indicator of past performance.  The relative importance of the two in evaluating the impact of an article should change significantly according to how long the article has been out.  When it's been out for less than a year, the journal IF should be a big factor.  When it's been out for two or more years, the citation rate should become more significant.

I agree with Clyde. Impact factors are proxies for future citations and citations are proxies for impact. In my experience, committees like to economize on effort and don't read papers in detail. Most faculty are not experts in each others' disciplines or sub-disciplines. Having a journal list or an impact factor to consult, while imperfect, serves as a reasonable proxy for what they are trying to divine. 

This is clearly problematic if the relationship between IF and citations weakens but it will continue to be used as long as something better is not available. Of course, if a candidate for promotion can display actual, rather than prospective, citations then this will tend to displace opinions based on impact factors. This is most likely with senior faculty as citations take a long time to accumulate. I think one could make a good case for promotion if your citations were twice as high as other full professors in your college or department. 

Hi Reginald,

We have mounting evidence that IF have their share of issues and reflect poorly on the quality of individual articles. Joel Baum has an article explaining this and how to fix the problem (see open access journal M@n@gement (vol 16, n. 5: http://www.management-aims.com/vol16_en.html).

In my field, one of the most influential article was famously published in a special issue of a second-tier journal… And its author is a widely recognized chaired professor, so there is hope!

Thank you Bernard.

I appreciate the information. Moreover, I have learned from the groups' posts on both of my recent questions concerning this issue of citations.

I will no longer see individual article citations the same way, as having a numerical threshold of citations for influence. In addition, what I gather from the thread to my question, is that if an article has been cited it is a good thing, unless it is cited as the exemplary for bad science; nevertheless, the magnitude of an article's citations influence is spurious--at best.

Therefore, any number of an article's citations, to me, greater than one should be viewed as having a positive influence, at least, on the person who cites the article.

Dear Reginald,

I agree with Kamal and his metaphor :"Gold will remain gold even if you put it in an elastic container".

This is correct, an article's citations should be compared with the average journal's citations

This is interesting to think about.

If a journal has, for example, an impact factor of 5 (five articles published by a journal cited five times each in a period of measure) this seems reasonable that an article with five citations in that same period of measure should be viewed similar as having at least equal influence as that journal?

Am I correct with this summary professor Vivarelli?  In other words, are you saying that one article with the same number of citations as a journal's impact factor is equivalent to that journal's influence or impact?

Please clarify. Thanks.

Thank you professor Bani-Hani because your comment now brings us right back to the original question.

However, I am starting to believe from the many comments above that an article's citations can trump the reputation of the journal in which it is published. This is very helpful since I serve on our college's tenure and promotion committee. I now have some pretty strong arguments to use in support of a faculty with a lot of citations, but not with articles published in the top tier journals.

I agree with Kamal regarding the good example he gave. The reputation of an article can be good despite the status of the journal.

I appreciate & go by Dean Whitehead's views. Frequency of citations, even of a lesser known journal, shows the currency and usefulness of the article. It could be specific to time, space and context.

Dear friends:

 That's all, friends! Have a great day!

With best wishes

Sundar

A frequently cited paper getting many citations will definitely jump a journal's IF in which it has been published, subject to the condition that citations are in Thomson Reuters journal. Even if a paper is published in a lesser known journal but it gets good citations means that it has high value, liked by researchers worldwide and is being used for many purposes and have a very high practical value. 

IF = citations of papers published in last 2 years (say 2011, 2012) in next year (2013) / no. of papers published in these 2 years -- hence more a papers will be cited more will be the IF

Dear Ruchi - Most of the researcher knows this equation and all editors try their best to get maximum out of this equation. More IF of a journal means more citations / avg paper -- and so higher IF more valuable a paper may be, also more citations to a paper means its more adaptability and utility in science.

I usually tell my doctoral students that at the end of the day what counts is the number of citations that your publications have got, not where they appear in.  An excellent example is the case of Ronald Coase, whose Nobel prize was mainly based on the following two articles:

Coase, R. H. 1937. The nature of the firm. Economica, 4(16): 386-405.

Coase, R. H. 1960. The problem of social cost. Journal of Law and Economics, 3(1): 1-44.

Neither of the journals is within the top three in economics. 

Correct Stefan,

There are some sources, however, that will let you know when you are cited in 'non-English' journals. Google Scholar is probably the main one - but Scopus does as well. 

While on this I have seen Social science research network (SSRN) publish no of times an article is downloaded or no of times an abstract is reviewed. Does any one know if committees take this stats into account on tenure or promotion.

I think the number of citations is important. People citing you are actually USING your research, it has become relevant. Dont forget that high impact journals have been known to turn down excellent papers because of referees attitudes. More regional or local publication with a lower impact rating might in fact be more relevant for local/regional research problems and applications.

I see some time has gone since the last entry here, but the discussion is still very relevant. I have a comment to Erick's question. The values you refer to are of the kind that now generally is referred to as altmetrics. I'm expecting them to become more and more important, but the scores here are still not the currency you're measured by in any kind of formal evaluation. When I'm on a committee I consider the number of peer review publications, the H index, citation statistics and also if the candidate has published in a high-ranking journal. In that order. I'm still a bit sceptical to some of the altmetrics as I'm unsure of what they actually measure (number of tweets relating to a publication for instance).