Good question!

Impact factors by themselves are meaningless. However, impact factors for a mathematics journal in your research area are good indicators of the extent that researdhers in your community are following what you write.

The impact factor of an academic journal is a measure reflecting the average number of citations to recent articles published in the journal.The impact factor was devised by Eugene Garfield, the founder of the Institute for Scientific Information. Impact factors are calculated yearly starting from 1975.

high Impact factors is a good indicator for your work.

@ Robin, so true. But I don't know why we become so reluctant to accept this simple fact particularly after the introduction of JIP. The point is with the attempt of trivializing things or rather trying to quantify each and every innovation, small or big.

I fully agree with Robin Damion. However, if you want to be offered a tenured position in the future, the jury/committe will pay much attention to the quality of journals you have published in and their impact factors.

Perhaps juries might read the papers and not start calculating impact factors. Anyway, I think you might work in both lines ... try to prepare good papers and try to publish in a high factor journal. If you fail to publish in highly cited media, at least don't fail to prepare good papers. I think the impact-factor-fever is not forever. By the way, there's something we can ask ourselves about non measured media: What is the value of authorship of an entry in Encyclopaedia Britannica?

@Carriegos ... Being a student of Mathematics, who have done very little research in Mathematics it would not have been proper to say but forgive me if I have crossed the limit; these so-called impact factors are doing no good for the researchers. In fact it has nothing to do with research, i don't know how much impact factor reveals but conceals much more important things (like credibility, quality ..etc) as like all statistical data.

@Arghya I remember now a popular paper some years ago: something like "Impact factors: Use and abuse" dealing with this question. Impact factors are neither good nor bad by themselves. The important point is our interpretation.

In Spain we say "It is bad being thirsty but too many water drown you".

Ah! Congratulations for your question ... 8 answers in 2 days.

@ Carriegos ... i will search and read the paper, you mentioned. Anyway good to have communications ... thank you.

According to me, being a researcher one should concentrate on publication rather impact point.

If publication is good and useful for others, impact point or factor will automatically go high.

Regards,

Nitish

@ Nitish ... good to know your view.

Well I think IF are not bad either.

They help me judging which one out of the subset of adequate journals for my current research has the highest likelihood to be read and cited.

I do not believe in IF or H-index as a metric for the researcher, but I use them as a metric for the journals themselves.

Ultimately, if your work is not sufficiently good, the best journal with the highest IF will not help dissemination and citation of your work, nor give to it relative importance through the years. Actually, it might well be the opposite: a widespread dissemination of a poor work will also reveal this weakness to the community. On the other end, the best research work published in an unread, uncited, low IF jourmal will hardly get sufficient dissemination to reach importance. Of course it may after years, but it is more difficult.

So the win/win situation is your work having very good quality, and you submit it to a suitable but at the same time high IF journal. Then you will get fast dissemination and your work may become relevant to the field in a shorter time.

But the first thing is: your work must be outstanding! So first concentrate in doing the best you can possibly do for every piece of work (regardless of publication metrics), and once your are ready to submit it, select the most adequate journal (and here you may consider IF as a weighting factor).

@Arghya

Thanks.

@ Samuel…good to know your view…impact factors are affected by a host of conditions which do not directly impose upon their primary use, a measure of the impact of publishing in a particular journal, but which sensibly limit how they can be applied.

Don’t you believe that it is clearly unsuitable to use IF to rank all types of journals in all subject areas, and even comparing the same type of journal in the same subject category? [e.g. I work essentially in Fluid Dynamics but in the mathematical or to be precise in the analytical domain which is different from the Computational domain, having lesser readership].

The JIF results are highly dependent to the statistical factors, if you take all these points into considerations even the journal rankings should also be treated with care, leave alone the IF. The Journal impact factor as a rule of thumb is huge mistake, I believe.

It’s a easy check through Google that journals with impact factors differing by less than 25% belong together in the same rank. The use of the absolute value of an impact factor to measure quality should be avoided, not only because of the variability of the subjects, but far more importantly because of the long-term average trends of different emerging fields, these emerging fields are subset of a classical field, they fluctuate, some stays but others remain popular in the research domain hardly for 20-25 years then gradually losses relevance.

Last but not the least 'research' is a implicit thought process, so a stereotypical judgement based on where you publish should not arise even if the journal's impact factors are not misused or misjudged. To my view, if required, bring a cultural change in the scientific community where research article are to be evaluated only with scientific merit not with where it has got published.

Ah! I have written a lot .... I should stop right now :-)

Arghya, I essentially agree to all your points (likewise even before we both stated our opinions).

Again, I think IF "per se" are not any good or any bad just one factor more (among others) to be considered.

I said "they help me judging" but they are definitely not the only one.

I agree that it is clearly unsuitable to use IF to rank all types of journals in all subject areas (IF in maths will be likely MUCH lower than in medicine), but IF get better when you restrict and compare a single particular domain of research (and they are still not free from bias).

I do not use/misuse IF as an absolute value (this is a misinterpretation of what IF are, I am aware that this misuse/misinterpretation is common in "comparative science merits", but I no not know when and why it originated, nor what to do to tumble it down).

I hope we both will agree that a research article needs to be evaluated solely based upon its scientific merit not with where it has got published, but as I said before publishing in low readership journals (which good or bad tend to be journals with low IF) will hardly get sufficient dissemination to reach importance. Of course it may after years if your work is really outstanding, but it is more difficult and will take longer.

Thanks Robin,

I will reconsider my position and ideas from now.

There is too much open debate on whether peer-review is the best approach to scrutinize and filter only good quality publications deserving dissemination, or just less unfair than any other proposed till now. Of course there is also debate on the "natural post-publication peer review" occurring just by the paper being read. Again this implies the paper is properly distributed to reach quantity and quality of readership.

I agree that we have the Internet, but I also want to tell you, despite being frustrated with many rejection and revision letters, I think I have only received 1 or 2 definitely unfair, all others (and they were hundreds) always contribute to pinpoint some unpolished detail of the manuscript. I would like to retain this feedback in any alternative way of publishing!

Making our papers open access is also wishful, but at least in my field (Sciences of Vision) just wisdom thinking. May journals offer open access policies these days... ...but at a cost ranging from 1000 to 3500 euro per paper... Again publishers behind may coordinate this to preserve their dominating position...

A few journals offer immediate or delayed open access "for free", and some of them have actually excellent reputation (and again high IF) (examples of those are Biomedical Optics Express, Journal of Vision, Journal of Optometry, Investigative Ophthalmology and Visual Sciences, Optometry and Vision Science, among others).

Of course, we can post papers on publicly searchable sites, but if they are published elsewhere then you have to check for the journal policies and which right you have retained. Indeed, you can also select the journal you are submitting to depending not on IF (I never said that, I just said IF is one of the contributors when I make decision, but open access is another one, and retained right for private distribution is another one) but on OA or private distribution.

Or if we do not trust the system at all, then we can upload it directly to RG, ArXiv, etc... WITHOUT being submitted elsewhere... but I think this is a small minority...

As many times in sciences, many of the discussed parameters are colinear... so (in my experience) journals with easy OA policies use to have high IF.

But again, the important thing is how good your is, all the rest is secondary...

I must disclose that I DO NOT have any interest in any particular publishers.

To finalize, I will reconsider my position and ideas from now.

Every research are looking for publishing article in a high impact factor journals. But I have observed that well written average work published in top journals but they some time reject top contributions from non-English speaking countries, because of language barrier, finally those works are get published in less known journals from third world countries.

I have read the arguments of both Robin, Samuel and all others very carefully, incidentally also read this following article today published in Nature News Blog few months back in 2013.

The report is by By R. V. Noorden.

"If enough eminent people stand together to condemn a controversial practice, will that make it stop?

That’s what more than 150 scientists and 75 science organizations are hoping for today, with a joint statement called the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA). It deplores the way some metrics — especially the notorious Journal Impact Factor (JIF) — are misused as quick and dirty assessments of scientists’ performance and the quality of their research papers.

“There is a pressing need to improve the ways in which the output of scientific research is evaluated,” DORA says.

Scientists routinely rant that funding agencies and institutions judge them by the impact factor of the journal they publish in — rather than by the work they actually do. The metric was introduced in 1963 to help libraries judge which journals to buy (it measures the number of citations the average paper in a journal has received over the past two years). But it bears little relation to the citations any one article is likely to receive, because only a few articles in a journal receive most of the citations. Focus on the JIF has changed scientists’ incentives, leading them to be rewarded for getting into high-impact publications rather than for doing good science.

“We, the scientific community, are to blame — we created this mess, this perception that if you don’t publish in Cell, Nature or Science, you won’t get a job,” says Stefano Bertuzzi, executive director of the American Society for Cell Biology (ACSB), who coordinated DORA after talks at the ACSB’s annual meeting last year. “The time is right for the scientific community to take control of this issue,” he says. Science and eLife also ran editorials on the subject today.

It has all been said before, of course. Research assessment “rests too heavily on the inflated status of the impact factor”, a Nature editorial noted in 2005; or as structural biologist Stephen Curry of Imperial College London put it in a recent blog post: “I am sick of impact factors and so is science”.

Even the company that creates the impact factor, Thomson Reuters, has issued advice that it does not measure the quality of an individual article in a journal, but rather correlates to the journal’s reputation in its field. (In response to DORA, Thomson Reuters notes that it’s the abuse of the JIF that is the problem, not the metric itself.)

But Bertuzzi says: “The goal is to show that the community is tired of this. Hopefully this will be a cultural change.” It’s notable that those signing DORA are almost all from US or European institutions, even though the ACSB has a website where anyone can sign the declaration.

(Nature Publishing Group, which publishes this blog, has not signed DORA: Nature’s editor-in-chief, Philip Campbell, said that the group’s journals had published many editorials critical of excesses in the use of JIFs, “but the draft statement contained many specific elements, some of which were too sweeping for me or my colleagues to sign up to”.).............."

Still think IF has no negative implications per se, but I agree that in many aspects there is a misuse of IF, as well as too much pressure a-la Publish or Perish, and as already mentioned before demand for quantifying research and researcher quality in a universal metric.

Back to your original question:

"Where do we stand really in terms of research publication and impact factors?"

I simply do not know

"Being a researcher is it publication or impact factors?"

Definitely not. See also the debates and discussions on the different publication bias:

Bias towards positive results

Bias towards results confirming and supporting the accepted science.

etc...

I do not have the answers, I share many of your concerns, but I just do not want to demonize IF.

I think this is a useful thread to continue discussion and to try to "join DORA", emulate DORA or propose further alternatives.

Great question Arghya, good discussion.

@Joydip Dhar .... good to know your view ..... I hope you have followed the discussion thread...... welcome all comments and particularly be happy if our divergence of opinion lead us to some alternative, as Samuel hinted.

Dear all, In continuation to what we are discussing ping this:

http://humanecologyblog.wordpress.com/2013/10/05/sting-operation-demonstrates-the-value-of-journal-impact-factors/

IF or not, there should be some way for distinguishing good journals from bad ones, good papers from bad ones. Probably the scientific community can think together and device a fool proof metric.

@Marc .... first of all thanks for your comment. Thanks for showing us your way of looking at it. The problem will still in some way or the other going to take some philosophical shape, you like it or not.. You are talking about citation, Let me tell you one example, I believe you perhaps know about the book Handbuch der physik, and in the volume 9 part 3 of that book there is a chapter on surface waves written by J. V. Wehausen and E. V. Laitone. My supervisor wrote a paper in a journal published from a Engineering college in India. It was probably 55 years back and Wehausen, a great fluid mechanist of all time, mentioned the work in his epoch making article on surface waves. Why? Because he understood the significance of the work. Where are such scientific peers like him, are they carefully selected to be both highly qualified as well as at 'arms-length' from the candidate? It seems 'no'. My experience may be different from the others, but there is an international mythical circle and you have to fall inside that to find your papers published in good journals or get higher IF. I may sound cynical or even a little away from my initial submissions on the topic, but this is the harsh reality that I faced sitting here in India. Otherwise, wait, as it has always happened with science you will get recognition, but after a long time perhaps......anyway thank you once again for your positive outlook and wise suggestions.

I fully support the vision and facts presented by prof. Robin Damion. Several years back I struggled to convince the authorities at my university with that with no success. Now it is clear and I will spread that among the Arabic speaking scientists allover the region.

@Arghya, do not worry on impact factor! I share @Robin attitude. The problem that bothers You , troubled many scientists and professors!

Thus, promotion and / or financing of a project has to do with the evaluation system in your country. Many of us are struggling to overcome such unfair system. Everyone must contribute within institution, country, and these RG threads and discussions can contribute and lead toward the right solution

@ Prof. Elwakil and @Prof. Jacić, thank for your comment. You are senior Professors in your respective fields and your views will work as encouragements to all my future research endeavors.

@Arghya, wish You the best regarding your future research! Success is a result of a hard work!

I am studying now most of what are written on JIF ,this may take some time ,I will come to you with the conclusion if GOD willing. However,I appreciate your precession for rising such Q and all answers. For sure ,we will get together with a wise alliance to please every one, I think.Until then , all the best.

@Prof. Elwakil, surely we must be getting some new directions from your inputs ... fingers crossed.

Dr. Bandyopadhyay, attached please find my presentation to the Promotion Committee of Plant Protection and Diseases. Also, the presentation is found on my website and here is the link:

http://www.mwakil.net/env/biology/critique-if.pdf

Now it is circulated among scientists in Egypt and allover as well. I will do my best to disseminate this information on a larger scale. Looking for your feedback.

An interesting link to look at : http://ijaridea.com/Web-of-Knowledge