Thanks to all for your answers. I think that the discussion is heading to an interesting field. I do agree with the point of view that everybody should aim to publish in the journals with the highest IF, because that put us in the road of competition, but what happens when some research is providing a huge improvement in a field, but the journals within the field have their priorities in other aspects? We may know that some specific middle to low IF journal would be happy to publish our paper, but should we try in the highest, even knowing that there is a huge chance to be rejected? These considerations have nothing to do with the quality of the research, or how well written is the paper. I do agree with Helmut and Jonathan that the use of IF by the institutions is related to the politics, but I think that Vincent make a good evaluation when pointing that the use of IF by institutions is the lazy way to avoid reading the work. Christian, it is true that high IF journals may require tons of data, but any good journal would love to publish data that is supported by tons of evidence. Someone of my institution recently sent a paper to Nature. The amount of data, the quality of the data and the relevance was overwhelming. Despite that, and the fact that one of the co-authors was someone who has published in Nature for decades, the paper was rejected, because it wasn’t on the main interest list of Nature. Something similar happened in the PNAS, and at the end, it was published in Plos-One. The point is, does that work is less important because was published in a journal with IF of 4.1, instead of a journal with IF of 36 or 9.7?

Nahed, it is more than OK to publish in a journal with IF of 3, and in my opinion, there are brilliant research published in journals with IF below that, and some crappy papers in high IF journals.

Just trying to stress an important point addressed by Vincent regarding the difference between Impact and IF, one of the leaders my field, has a paper (with the highest amount of citations of his productivity, which are more than 200 papers) published in 2000 in EHP. In that year, the IF for that journal was just above 3, and it has more than 550 citations. He also has a couple of papers published in the early 90’s, on Environ Res, when the IF for that journal was bellow 2, and both papers have more than 300 citations, each…

Dear Ernesto,

The answer is simple:

Scientists have to publish their work as high as possible to refinance the work with good grands and to get effective response from the comunity.

If you publish your work in Nature it's easy to get both. If you publish in complete unknown Journals it's hard to get this positive response.

Anything else is "academic politics".

Ah, the Impact Factor rears it's ugly head yet again... there have been many publications on this in numerous journals by thought leaders in many different scientific fields, which all boil down to a single, and in my opinion, unsatisfactorily answered question: what does the impact factor REALLY mean? Unfortunately, as you yourself point out, I don't think you will get the same answer if you were to survey multiple people. Suffice it to say, when thinking about publishing your own work, and in my opinion, you should set realistic expectations and goals. This is largely dictated by the field of research you are involved in, the relative interest of your work within other scientific disciplines, the novelty of your research, and the robustness of your data. A top-tier journal such as Nature likely values novel, ground-breaking science, either within a specific scientific discipline or its applicability to a wider scientific audience. As a result, more 'weight' is applied to publishing in this particular journal. There is nothing wrong with aiming high and the first round of reviews usually provide a coherent response on how best to proceed. There is also the balance between the age-old 'publish or perish' mentality - should you generate more and more data with the possibility of publishing in higher-echelon journals at the expense of time, research costs, and grant money or should you aim for a medium-level journal with a greater chance of being published? That the impact factor is used to 'judge' and 'rank' the overall capability of a scientific researcher on a University level is, as Helmut put it, a case of academic politics.

Its not only the impact factor which is important, its also the relevance of the work for a broader audience. If you want to publish in Nature/Cell/Science then you need to have such a paper containing a ton of data, which will easily make two or even three smaller papers.

It depends strongly on the fields what the biggest IF is, cancer research is a hot topic where actual paper with new research easily generate a lot of citations. If you work a bit off the focus, you don't get as much citations, so you IF is lower, although for your field of research this may be the most important publication in years. Unfortunately people tend to look at the IFs, even though the meaning is limited.

If you read IF around 100, then this are most likely journals, which publish only invited reviews which are then cited quite a lot.

The consideration of impact factor while submitting the manuscript is important in the sense that most of the high impact journals are subscribed in well known research institutions and research gains ample weightage if published in a good impact factor journal. There has been a very fruitful discussion on this topic previously also and I hope you can probably arrive at an answer for your question after reading the expert comments using the following link

https://www.researchgate.net/post/How_important_is_the_impact_factor_of_a_journal1

Thanks and regards

Impact and impact factor (IF) are different things. Depending on the field, but also of the gap between the two top journals in a given field, you can have a big impact on your particular community with a relatively low IF. Another bias is the fact that free access journals tend to be more cited, just because low-budget labs can read, and thus cite them. Finally, good papers can be published in low-IF journals, and the other way round.

IF is one of these easy recipes to avoid really evaluating people / labs / articles. It shouldn't be the only way to evaluate, and should be used with caution in combination with other, more time-consuming methods (like actually reading the work!).

Thanks to all for your answers. I think that the discussion is heading to an interesting field. I do agree with the point of view that everybody should aim to publish in the journals with the highest IF, because that put us in the road of competition, but what happens when some research is providing a huge improvement in a field, but the journals within the field have their priorities in other aspects? We may know that some specific middle to low IF journal would be happy to publish our paper, but should we try in the highest, even knowing that there is a huge chance to be rejected? These considerations have nothing to do with the quality of the research, or how well written is the paper. I do agree with Helmut and Jonathan that the use of IF by the institutions is related to the politics, but I think that Vincent make a good evaluation when pointing that the use of IF by institutions is the lazy way to avoid reading the work. Christian, it is true that high IF journals may require tons of data, but any good journal would love to publish data that is supported by tons of evidence. Someone of my institution recently sent a paper to Nature. The amount of data, the quality of the data and the relevance was overwhelming. Despite that, and the fact that one of the co-authors was someone who has published in Nature for decades, the paper was rejected, because it wasn’t on the main interest list of Nature. Something similar happened in the PNAS, and at the end, it was published in Plos-One. The point is, does that work is less important because was published in a journal with IF of 4.1, instead of a journal with IF of 36 or 9.7?

Nahed, it is more than OK to publish in a journal with IF of 3, and in my opinion, there are brilliant research published in journals with IF below that, and some crappy papers in high IF journals.

Just trying to stress an important point addressed by Vincent regarding the difference between Impact and IF, one of the leaders my field, has a paper (with the highest amount of citations of his productivity, which are more than 200 papers) published in 2000 in EHP. In that year, the IF for that journal was just above 3, and it has more than 550 citations. He also has a couple of papers published in the early 90’s, on Environ Res, when the IF for that journal was bellow 2, and both papers have more than 300 citations, each…

In my opinion a paper should stand on its merits independent of the Impact Factor of the journal it is published in. We all know that when a paper comes along that challenges decades-long dogma it is more often than not accompanied by a knee-jerk reaction from thought leaders in the field. As we know, dogma is highly resistant to change, even in the face of solid evidence, because it forces us to rethink our interpretation and at the same time accept the possibility that our initial interpretation may now be open to re-interpretation based on new facts or data not previously evaluable or available. This, in general, is a hard sell to a top-tier journal even though it may eventually become a landmark paper with hundreds of citations published in a lower-esteemed journal. By the same token, we are all aware of papers published in top-tier journals that we may question from a personal perspective. Again, we circle back to the same question without a perfect resolution: what does the Impact Factor REALLY mean? I, for one, know this question will circle around for many, many decades to come.

@Ernesto: I judge papers by their content and not by the IF of the journal. I have read bullshit in high ranked journals and pearls in small papers. Today its not really important to get high IF anymore, since papers can be found via Pubmed. Its probably more important to make them available so people can read them. Nothing is more annoying to find something interesting where you don't get access to. So open access is the big thing.

Besides that, I have always been trying to publish as high as possible.

I think it is not a yes or no response. It all comes to singular cases. Sometimes it is pure snobbism the desire to publish in high impact journals. Some labs prefer to have 2 or 3 papers in low-moderate IF over combining them in one high IF journal. The contrary is also true but that may come at a price, such as the invested time, etc.. . It is politics. It doesn’t mean necessarily it is a bad thing.

What happens when you see that after some years the journal impact has fallen to low ranks or your low IF journal paper has increased? Is science inflationary too? Some works may even be highly cited because nobody agrees with them. So, again how do we stand?

I think we are having a very good discussion and two new issues arise, that we have to pay attention to. 1) Free access journals: Indeed Christian, I do agree that nowadays we want to have free access to the information and that’s the reason of the huge success of some free access journals, that appear in the last decade, jumping their IF above most of very well established journals that have been published for decades. Free access is the future, indeed, and I hope that we will be able to have open access to most journals within the next decade. 2) Abdelhalim highlights something interesting, the inflationary process in science. If we take a look to IF, we will find that there is an increasing number of journals indexed with an IF. That means that more articles are published and therefore, more new articles cite previous work. That leads to an increase of citations and the concomitant increase of the IF. For instance, in 2007 there were 141 journals in the oncology field with IF, and in 2011 the number grew to 196. The highest IF for this field in 2007 was 75.6 and 11% (16 journals) had an IF above 6. In 2011 the highest IF was 101.8 and 11% (21 journals) had an IF above 6. The proportion seem not to change, but the total numbers are clearly inflationary.

Finally, I do agree with Jonathan, a paper should stand on its merits, but then again, why are the institutions giving so much importance to IF?