Ok people here is the sort of response we need to be dealing with: 'new journals' are still relatively untested and who reads them? and why! and is the best way to publish science?

Here is an abstract of an open access paper from Brembs & colleagues on the unintended consequences of journal ranking published on Frontiers (http://www.frontiersin.org/Journal/10.3389/fnhum.2013.00291/abstract):

"Most researchers acknowledge an intrinsic hierarchy in the scholarly journals (“journal rank”) that they submit their work to, and adjust not only their submission but also their reading strategies accordingly. On the other hand, much has been written about the negative effects of institutionalizing journal rank as an impact measure. So far, contributions to the debate concerning the limitations of journal rank as a scientific impact assessment tool have either lacked data, or relied on only a few studies. In this review, we present the most recent and pertinent data on the consequences of our current scholarly communication system with respect to various measures of scientific quality (such as utility/citations, methodological soundness, expert ratings or retractions). These data corroborate previous hypotheses: using journal rank as an assessment tool is bad scientific practice. Moreover, the data lead us to argue that any journal rank (not only the currently-favored Impact Factor) would have this negative impact. Therefore, we suggest that abandoning journals altogether, in favor of a library-based scholarly communication system, will ultimately be necessary. This new system will use modern information technology to vastly improve the filter, sort and discovery functions of the current journal system."

Statement from the Australian National Health & Medical Research Council on the impact factor is available here:

https://www.nhmrc.gov.au/_files_nhmrc/file/grants/peer/impact%20factors%20in%20peer%20review.pdf

Bottom-line? "Journal Impact Factor is not a sound basis upon which to judge the impact of individual papers."

On the weakening relationship between journal impact factor and an individual paper's citations:

https://www.academia.edu/1552915/The_weakening_relationship_between_the_Impact_Factor_and_papers_citations_in_the_digital_age

One of the responses I get about NOT using the journal impact factor (IF) is: how do I know if a journal is reputable? There has been a lot of discussion over predatory open access publishers for example. An updated list of these publishers is available here FYI:

http://scholarlyoa.com/publishers/

Some great content there Michael, thank you! A reply to one of my tweets on what postdocs and ECRs can do is to highlight ranking of journal in its discipline (& stating rank), metrics that are available on Web of Science. Authorship contribution & role in collaborations could be emphasised too.

The problem is: how to effectively disseminate results of our research? It seems there will be competion between "IF journals" and "OA journals" in the future. Europe and North America may lost scientific supremacy, I am afraid. Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Singaporean, Brasilian, etc. universities and research centers may become predominant. Where the greatest grants lies?

Hi Emilia, dissemination of our findings is a very important issue. I recommend checking out http://theconversation.com/au. Sign up as an author and work with professional journalists to distribute your science to the masses! Great service!

Worth reading and discussing: "Boycotting academic publishers is a career risk for young scientists". This issue goes to the heart of the problem we face as we climb the academic ladder.

http://www.theguardian.com/higher-education-network/blog/2014/jan/29/boycott-academic-journals-early-career-researchers?CMP=twt_gu&utm_content=buffer358c8&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer

Seen the new paper The Disaster of the Impact Factor?

"The desire to be highly evaluated may lead scientists to waste time and energy by running behind journals with a ‘‘high impact factor’’ in a long process of submission/rejection cycles to the detriment of focusing on their research."

http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11948-014-9517-0

I have just come across a very blatant example of where IF is being used inappropriately and against the DORA statement... at my own university!

http://www.psiquiatriafmusp.org.br/pg/pagina.php?FhIdPagina=44#topo

"Produção científica: publicação de 6 artigos completos no último triênio, em periódicos indexados no ISI com Fator de Impacto (FI): ≥ 1,2, sendo que pelo menos duas das publicações devem ser em periódico com FI: ≥ 2,5. E, no mínimo, em quatro destas publicações, participação como primeiro ou último autor."

Context and translation? Basically, in the last 3 years researchers must have published at least 6 papers with an IF greater than 1.2, and at least 2 publications with an IF greater than 2.5 in order to be able to supervise masters students!

Lamp J.W. (2009) "Journal ranking and the dreams of academics" Online Information Review, 33(4), pp827-830

Even Eugene Garfield - inventor of the JIF - is not happy with the way it has been used.

The purpose of this article is to review and comment on the Australian Government’s entry into the journal ranking domain. It provides a review and reflection on the approach and potential impact of the direction taken. This project is arguably the largest of its type and the effects on academic publishing and the survival of journals could be far reaching. The article draws together current material on the Australian Government’s activities and provides details of the scope of the journal ranking project.

http://lamp.infosys.deakin.edu.au/pubs/09_OIR-era-process.pdf

Small number of pubs drive the IF (see the long tails) http://t.co/v0HbeUt9UO … http://t.co/8Wggs2U0b7

"Journal impact factors cannot be used to quantify the importance of individual papers or the credit due to their authors, and one of the minor mysteries of our time is why so many scientifically sophisticated people give so much credence to a procedure that is so obviously flawed."

"The National Health and Medical Council has adopted the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment, which commits signatories to stop using journal impact factors as a “surrogate measure of the quality of individual research articles.” A bunch of recommendations follow on what will make research measurement more accurate but certainly harder, including for publishers who are urged to either stop using journal impact in marketing or to present it with a range of other measures. DORA also demands publishers “remove all reuse limitations” on reference lists in research articles and make them available under creative commons rules. As far as I know the ARC is yet to endorse DORA but it seems to me it should. However, hoping the publishers will actually acknowledge a reform not in their interests is probably too much to expect.""

http://campusmorningmail.com.au/

https://www.nhmrc.gov.au/media/newsletters/research-tracker/2014/nhmrc-research-tracker-21-february-2014

My submission of papers are now not based on Impact factor. I submit to journals that are open access, or consider charging nominal publication fee and that waive charges if we request

Thanks Ramana, have you experienced any repercussions from this? (e.g. Promotion committees questioning the quality of your work)

I think that for really effective exposure, publish in the journals used by the authorities you cite. Simple, effective. If your institutions are focused on specific journals, throw them a bone occasionally. My peers will be around longer than my institution's administrative policies.

Some time impact factor is not an indicative of high quality journal, because I found many mistakes and irrelevant work in high impact factor journals, or even sometimes the reviewers are not fully knowledgeable about the author works and give unprofessional or even meaningless comments. TQ

I think one thing to bear in mind in these discussions is your intended audience and what they read. Surely that must be the primary consideration when selecting a journal. How many of us as readers of literature select a journal to read simply for its IF???

Dear Andrew Kemp: Sorry for the late response. But I am in a place where hardly any one recognizes you until you are outstandingly projecting your self.

Unfortunately in India (at places i Know) people hardly know about publication, Impact, Indexing (Pubmed/Scopus). If they need publication they go to any extent. Really heartening. No one wants to work hard. They just do something if offered money. That is the reason many journals have come up which just publish after taking money.

It can only change as you said some body has to screen papers for their quality

I believe if the peers have quality, they need no other parameter *(IMPACT) to evaluate the quality.

Thanks for the recent comments.

Here in Brazil, I am facing resistance to submitting manuscripts to my own research topic at Frontiers in Psychology:

http://www.frontiersin.org/emotion_science/researchtopics/mechanisms_underpinning_the_li/2668

as the journal is yet to receive an impact factor. This is despite the Frontiers journals recently partnering with the Nature Publishing Group, substantially raising its profile. Frontiers in Psychology is waiting receive its first impact factor in July this year (2014), and my colleagues are waiting to see what the IF will be.

This due to specific requirements here in Brazil (University of Sao Paulo) that researchers must have published at least 6 papers with an IF greater than 1.2, and at least 2 publications with an IF greater than 2.5 in order to be able to supervise masters students!

http://www.psiquiatriafmusp.org.br/pg/pagina.php?FhIdPagina=44#topo

["Produção científica: publicação de 6 artigos completos no último triênio, em periódicos indexados no ISI com Fator de Impacto (FI): ≥ 1,2, sendo que pelo menos duas das publicações devem ser em periódico com FI: ≥ 2,5. E, no mínimo, em quatro destas publicações, participação como primeiro ou último autor."]

While the DORA statement - http://am.ascb.org/dora/ - is an important step in dealing with these requirements, much advocacy is still required.

New #openaccess article on the impact factor, a "debilitating & destructive epidemic" AND what we can do about it... http://t.co/QkoOqrkCdF

hi dear friend

The impact factor might have started out as a good idea, but its time has come and gone. Conceived by Eugene Garfield in the 1970s as a useful tool for research libraries to judge the relative merits of journals when allocating their subscription budgets, the impact factor is calculated annually as the mean number of citations to articles published in any given journal in the two preceding years.

By the early 1990s it was clear that the use of the arithmetic mean in this calculation is problematic because the pattern of citation distribution is so skewed. Analysis by Per Seglen in 1992 showed that typically only 15% of the papers in a journal account for half the total citations. Therefore only this minority of the articles has more than the average number of citations denoted by the journal impact factor. Take a moment to think about what that means: the vast majority of the journal’s papers — fully 85% — have fewer citations than the average. The impact factor is a statistically indefensible indicator of journal performance; it flatters to deceive, distributing credit that has been earned by only a small fraction of its published papers.

But the real problem started when impact factors began to be applied to papers and to people, a development that Garfield never anticipated. I can’t trace the precise origin of the growth but it has become a cancer that can no longer be ignored. The malady seems to particularly afflict researchers in science, technology and medicine who, astonishingly for a group that prizes its intelligence, have acquired a dependency on a valuation system that is grounded in falsity. We spend our lives fretting about how high an impact factor we can attach to our published research because it has become such an important determinant in the award of the grants and promotions needed to advance a career. We submit to time-wasting and demoralising rounds of manuscript rejection, retarding the progress of science in the chase for a false measure of prestige.

Twenty years on from Seglen’s analysis a new paper by Jerome Vanclay from Southern Cross University in Australia has reiterated the statistical ineptitude of using arithmetic means to rank journals and highlighted other problems with the impact factor calculation. Vanclay points out that it fails to take proper account of data entry errors in the titles or dates of papers, or of the deficient and opaque sampling methods used by Thomson Reuters in its calculation. Nor, he observes, does the two-year time limit placed on the impact factor calculation accommodate variations in the temporal citation patterns between different fields and journals; peak citations to Nature papers occurs 2-3 years following publication whereas citations of papers in Ecology take much more time to accrue and are maximal only after 7-8 years). Whichever way you look, the impact factor is a mis-measure.

Vanclay’s paper is a worthy addition to the critical literature on the impact factor. Its defects and perverse effects are well known and have been dissected by David Colquhoun, Michael Eisen and Peter Lawrence, among others. Even Philip Campbell, editor-in-chief of Nature, which has one of the highest impact factors in the business, has recognised that we need to escape its dispiriting hold over the lives of researchers.

Writing in 2008, Campbell (albeit somewhat uncertainly) saw a possible solution to the impact factor conundrum in the rise of mega-journals like PLoS ONE, which publish exclusively online and judge papers only on their novelty and technical competence, and in the potential of article-level metrics to assess the scientific worth of papers and their authors. In the end, however, he couldn’t shake the editorial habit of selection, writing of the contents of archives and mega-journals: “nobody wants to have to wade through a morass of papers of hugely mixed quality, so how will the more interesting papers […] get noticed as such?”

Four years later such views are being buffeted by the rising tides of open access and social media. It might sound paradoxical but nobody should have to wade through the entire literature because everybody could be involved in the sifting.

The trick will be to crowd-source the task. Now I am not suggesting we abandon peer-review; I retain my faith in the quality control provided by expert assessment of manuscripts before publication, but this should simply be a technical check on the work, not an arbiter of its value. The long tails of barely referenced papers in the citation distributions of all journals — even those of high rank — are evidence enough that pre-publication peer review is an unreliable determinant of ultimate worth.

Instead we need to find ways to attach to each piece of work the value that the scientific community places on it though use and citation. The rate of accrual of citations remains rather sluggish, even in today’s wired world, so attempts are being made to capture the internet buzz that greets each new publication; there are interesting innovations in this regard from the likes of PLOS, Mendeley and altmetrics.org.

The old guard may be shaking their heads and murmuring darkly about gaming of any system that tries to capture the web-chatter sparked by new research. But they shouldn’t be so concerned. Any working scientist will have experienced the thrill of hearing exciting new findings reported at a conference where results do not need to be wrapped between the covers of a particular journal for their significance to be appreciated. All it takes is for people to gather together in the coffee break and talk. The web allows something akin that process to be energised on a daily basis; if we tap in online as the community of scientists downloads and flags up the papers of greatest interest to them, we could recover a sense of the worth of the scientific literature (and the efforts behind it) that is factual rather than fictional.

These developments go hand in hand with the rise of open access (OA) publishing. Though primarily motivated by the research and societal benefits that will accrue from freeing the dissemination of the research literature, open access is also needed to optimise crowd-sifting of the literature by making it accessible to everyone. But the growth of open access is also being held back by the leaden hand of the impact factor. This year has seen several significant policy developments in the US, EU and UK, but we still have a considerable way to go. In the long term open access can only work by moving to a gold ‘author pays’ model that has to be funded by monies released from subscription cancellations, but while we continue to place false value in impact factors, the publishers of high ranking journals can claim that the cost of sifting and rejecting scores of manuscripts must be borne by the system and therefore warrants exorbitant charges for gold OA.

It doesn’t have to be this way. We can avoid high cost gold OA and achieve a system of valuation that works by ridding ourselves of the impact factor.

I don’t wish to under-estimate the difficulties. I am well aware of the risks involved, particularly to young researchers trying to forge a career in a culture that is so inured to the impact factor. It will take a determined and concerted effort from those in a position of influence, not least by senior researchers, funders and university administrators. It won’t be easy and it won’t be quick. Two decades of criticism have done little to break the addiction to a measure of worth that is statistically worthless.

But every little helps, so, taking my cue from society’s assault on another disease-laden dependency, it is time to stigmatise impact factors the way that cigarettes have been. It is time to start a smear campaign so that nobody will look at them without thinking of their ill effects, so that nobody will mention them uncritically without feeling a prick of shame.

So consider all that we know of impact factors and think on this: if you use impact factors you are statistically illiterate.

If you include journal impact factors in the list of publications in your cv, you are statistically illiterate.

If you are judging grant or promotion applications and find yourself scanning the applicant’s publications, checking off the impact factors, you are statistically illiterate.

If you publish a journal that trumpets its impact factor in adverts or emails, you are statistically illiterate. (If you trumpet that impact factor to three decimal places, there is little hope for you.)

If you see someone else using impact factors and make no attempt at correction, you connive at statistical illiteracy.

Dear friends, in the era of open access, one should never bother about impact factor of journals as your paper is as good as its quality and not the journals. Many high impact journals charge huge amounts and if we are unable to pay will not publish and do not waive off in my experience

@Mehdi Hedayatpoor,

Your interesting answer is in fact a verbatim copy of a 2012 blog post by Stephen Curry: http://occamstypewriter.org/scurry/2012/08/13/sick-of-impact-factors

For the sake of honesty, you should have mentioned the source or, best, you could have simply said that you had found an interesting blog post, and given the URL.

Just a thought: should impact factors be used to determine what the best journal is in your field? i.e. is it appropriate to use journal impact factor to determine journal ranking? My hunch is that it is, but would be interested in what others think about this.