In my opinion, it is mainly the other way round: a high impact factor means that a journal is attractive, therefore many papers are submitted and also many are rejected. On the other hand, many rejections increase the quality and thus also the impact factor. However, in order to be able to reject many papers, enough must be submitted.

I assume that you mainly focus on the Journal Impact Factor (JIF). No, theoretically there is no connection between JIF and numerical measures such as time to publication, frequency, issues per year, etc. JIF usually depends on the citations received and citable articles published in a considered time frame. I have hardly seen any publications that reveal strong correlations between JIF and some of the other factors you have mentioned (including rejection/acceptance rates), yet I do not decline the existance of such relations though. Despite the influence of these (trivial) factors, I strongly beleive that the answer for 'why do people cite articles?' could influence more on JIF.

Thank you for the response Wolfgang R. Dick I agreed that High impact factor of a journal could attract authors of the related field to send articles for possible publication, however, I do not accord the statement "a high impact factor means that a journal is attractive" As rightly pointed by Manjula Wijewickrema that "JIF usually depends on the citations received and citable articles published in a considered time frame." I want to go parallel to what Manjula Wijewickrema said regarding the correlations between JIF and some other factors I mentioned simply because There was scenario from some Elsevier multidisciplinary journals, where an author submitted multiple articles but was advised to submit the latter elsewhere since his first article is under consideration as they are trying to maintain in every issue the multidisciplinary aspect of the journal and further stated that it is part of the requirement for journal score ranking and IF. Thanks for your valuable replies.

Dear Umar M. Modibbo: I think the rate of rejection (not the rate of acceptance) shows that we are talking about a high quality journal with a high standard for its publications. When a journal has a strict criteria for accenting the submission, it means high-quality papers are being published there and it goes without saying that the high-quality papers are usually cited more frequently. From this viewpoint, a journal with higher rates of rejection should have a higher IF.

The rate of acceptance, however, doesn't necessarily reflect the quality of a given journal. Higher rate of acceptance is not a good point most of the time. Poor journals usually have a higher rate of acceptance since those high-quality papers are not commonly submitted to them but they go for better places.

As you know, impact factor is calculated based on citations per documents achieved. It means IF and the rate of rejections/acceptances are quite different. However, the h-index is commonly high for those journals with higher rejection rates. So if you see a particular journal with higher h-index, it means this journal has a relatively tough peer-review process with higher rate of rejections, most probably. Therefore, if you are seeking for a good place for your manuscript, the best trick might be to find a journal with higher IF but lower h-index. This trick works most of the time.

Good luck