Journal Citation Reports 2012 was recently published with an updated Journal's Impact Factors. Is Impact Factor a valid measure of a Journal's outreach, and if so, what is a "good" Impact Factor in Psychology?
it depends to your organization, sometimes for promotion they pay attention to your published papers based on the IF. But I think number of your citation is very important for your H-Index which is a international index.
Agreed, but since both IF and H-index are based on citations, wouldn't your H-index increase once you publish in a journal with a high IF?
no, h-index is due to how much you cite from your previous paper in your new one, or how much others cite your paper in their article which is not related to the IF of the Journal u have published. But indirectly , usually other researchers read and cite papers from more valid journals with high IF.
The impact factor is one of several ways of assessing a journal's prestige and how many people are likely to read your work. How important is it? This depends in part on where you work, and where you aspire to work. The top research universities and institutes pay attention to exactly which journals people publish in, to be sure - though increasingly they're more focused on how much grant money you can bring in, so they can think of you as a revenue source rather than an employee they need to bankroll. Less eminent institutions (including mabny perfectly good ones) are happy to see that you're meeting peer review standards and publishing, period. (Remember, too, that the high-impact journals will be harder to break in to, so you may end up publishing some of your work in lesser journals anyway, just months or years later...)
So some institutes do demand publications in journals with x IF? Or do they keep track of publications in high IF journals to poach researchers? Essentially I'm asking whether the Journal's IF itself is a defining feature of your paper, or whether there's another metric that we base publication / manuscript submission decisions on (except obviously the theme of the Journal).
I think it is an important consideration. In my personal history, I have often written ecological papers to support natural resource management. So, I tended to place them in rather applied journals that managers at least occasionally read (Environmental Management, Journal of Forestry, Park Science, etc.). To me it was more important to get the work completed, peer reviewed, and published than to shoot for wide visibility among scientists though high journal IF. I have since learned that most senior scientists who may be conducting academic hiring, conducting tenure reviews, and research promotion reviews in research organizations are likely to be much more interested in citation than were the managers I was targeting with my work. So, in that respect, my body of research, had I placed it in higher IF journals would likely have been more widely cited, and would have improved employment prospects. So, it really boils down to where you want to take your career. If you are headed for academia or a pure research position, I think journal IF is an important thing to consider.
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