We are encouraged by our University to publish our research papers only in journals with "high impact factor". But what should the impact factor be to be considered high?
"High impact factor" means different things for different fields (for example Nature and Science have IFs somewhere around 30, but they do not cover all fields: e.g. it is pretty much impossible to publish a paper in pure maths there) and if your administration uses such a wording they should better explain what they mean to avoid misunderstanding. Also, one should be careful when using IFs as a quality indicator of single articles, see e.g. the discussions below.
https://www.researchgate.net/post/The_future_of_impact_factor_will_its_role_diminish?
https://www.researchgate.net/post/2016_Google_Scholar_Metrics_for_journals_have_been_released_Do_you_find_them_more_useful_than_the_alternatives_impact_factor_eigenfactor_etc?
https://www.researchgate.net/post/Which_journal_metric_impact_factor_eigenfactor_Google_Scholar_metric_etc_best_reflects_the_prestige_of_a_given_journal_in_the_expert_community?
"High impact factor" means different things for different fields (for example Nature and Science have IFs somewhere around 30, but they do not cover all fields: e.g. it is pretty much impossible to publish a paper in pure maths there) and if your administration uses such a wording they should better explain what they mean to avoid misunderstanding. Also, one should be careful when using IFs as a quality indicator of single articles, see e.g. the discussions below.
https://www.researchgate.net/post/The_future_of_impact_factor_will_its_role_diminish?
https://www.researchgate.net/post/2016_Google_Scholar_Metrics_for_journals_have_been_released_Do_you_find_them_more_useful_than_the_alternatives_impact_factor_eigenfactor_etc?
https://www.researchgate.net/post/Which_journal_metric_impact_factor_eigenfactor_Google_Scholar_metric_etc_best_reflects_the_prestige_of_a_given_journal_in_the_expert_community?
Each and every journal which has high impact factor is not best. Like you take the example of some non-scopus journals. They will impact factors of around 5-7 but will not be scopus. So, before publishing any research work just make sure you check the scopus database and then proceed. Check the below file for further info.
Romer -
As Artur noted, this varies greatly by discipline. Statistics journals have very low "impact factors," though the ultimate impact may be very high. Most disciplines rely heavily on statistical science, but rely on few to actually read and understand the papers. One upshot of this which has come to light recently is that there have been perhaps thousands of studies with possibly incorrect conclusions drawn because of a misunderstanding of the meaning and usefulness (or uselessness) of relying on p-values.
See the following:
Press release for the American Statistical Association:
http://www.amstat.org/newsroom/pressreleases/P-ValueStatement.pdf
and
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/262971440_Practical_Interpretation_of_Hypothesis_Tests_-_letter_to_the_editor_-_TAS
But impact factors are supposedly related to the number of references, and thus quantity is the driving factor, not quality. Also, I have seen it commented that some may be trying to manipulate these numbers.
The administrator who relies on impact factor is like the scientist who relies on a p-value, they are both sadly misinformed. Unfortunately, administrators often do not have the technical expertise to perform their jobs well, and likely we have all had to deal with that to some degree.
Best wishes - Jim
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