Does the assessment of published article depend on the journal impact factor or on the content of the manuscript?
Generally universities and other institutes give more weightage to high impact factor published manuscript rather then article published in non impact factor research journal. In India,some state government had laid down the condition of impact factor journal published research papers as one of the eligibility criteria for the selection of Professors in the institute,
Generally, research studies published in high impact factor journals are considered more authentic but sometimes high impact factor is due the editorial policies of a journal which favours its high citation. So, content of the manuscript is more important and it is illogical to use the impact factor as a criterion for academic evaluation of a scientist.
There is the mistaken notion that the frequency of a paper's citation is a proxy for its quality Journals with high citation indexes often have larger general readerships (Lancet, New England Journal of Medicine) and if they count citations of editorials, there will be a highly inflated citation index for that journal, and hence a large 'impact factor'. My European colleagues are now being ranked on how many papers they have in journals with impact factors > 5. There is also the h-index (see Wikipedia for its description) used to establish 'merit' for faculty. This is an unfortunate development,, because it means no one is actually reading your articles when deciding on your scientific performance.
I do not appreciate the IF. In general, this the bench mark deciding the quality of the paper. If you grow in science the IF also grows. lalitha kabilan
I have written about the H-index and Impact factors here...
http://blogs.cuit.columbia.edu/agr3/2013/02/12/career-development-know-your-h-index/
Dear Andrew,
Measuring the number of times articles written by a scholar have been cited will not offer an advantage over the impact factor, because the reasons for citation don’t reflect the significance of the article .
There is no correlation between journal impact factor and the importance or citedness of any individual paper. My most cited article was in a journal I heard described by a distinguished professor as a vanity publication. However, I think it is reasonable for appointment panels to consider how many articles candidates have in high impact journals, as it shows they are the sort of persons who can consistently get papers in the most competitive journals. So, on balance, I think it is probably ok for RG to weight publications by IF in computing RG score.
The impact factor for the journal you published in should have no relevance. The impact of your articles, as reflected in the h-factor, is a much more valid measure. The journal you publish in has more to do with whether you are conducting bandwagon science, which tends to accumulate citations from others following the same research fad.
For journals that consider health equity as central to their mission, current impact factor indicators are sorely inadequate. We need to develop new instruments to measure impact of our publishing--both articles and journals--on health and social outcomes. That is, we need to go beyond the research community itself to find out how research is actually influencing policy and practice. MEDICC Review is working with a group of other publishers to explore how such instruments might be developed.
Contents are one of the factors that determine the quality of papers based on one of the popular metrics--JIF or h-index, as instruments for measuring the quality. However, the most commonly used factor is the number of citations received by the author and the prestige of both source and citing journals. If you publish a high quality research paper in a low impact journal, it may not be noticed, picked up, or ignored by the scientists and scholars who always select citations from high impact source journals. As such you may not get enough citations and therefore will get lower rank. . On the other hand, the papers in high impact journals will be cited in much higher -ranked journals. It is tested and confirmed by scholars in the literature..So, I do not agree with our colleagues, who give more importance to the contents. Knowing the quality of journals in the subject areas of his or her interest, why the author of a quality manuscript would he or she not care about the impact factor of the journal, which is accepted as the measure of quality in academia
A useful MOOC course regarding publishing in High-impact journals. Discounted course link pasted below:
https://www.udemy.com/publishing-in-impact-factor-journals-tips-and-tricks/?couponCode=ABC100
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