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(Volume: 2, Issue: 3)
Publication in Impact Factor Journals- A Necessity?
Almost all the renowned universities prefer to provide a doctoral degree, only when the individual has publications in the journals with high Impact Factor (IF). What is IF and What is the real significance of publishing articles in journals with high IF? How does it influence the author? Let’s have a glimpse at it.
What is Impact Factor (IF)?
Impact Factor refers to a scientometric index from Clarivative, a British-American publicly traded analytics company. IF is an index for analysing and measuring the mean number of citations that the scholarly articles in an academic journal receive in a year, in relation to the number of publications received in the immediately preceding two or five years. With this index, an academic journal is ranked high than the rest of the journals operating in its field, since it is believed that more citation counts point to more readership ability and knowledge expertise of the journal in the respective field.
Publication in high IF journals-The reality
As per the present-day scenario, though IF is used to rank a journal, an article published in it is also ranked high. It is actually a misconception to rank an article based on the journal rankings because both are very different to get compared. An article is ranked high only when it presents quality research in a well-documented form with explanatory figures, experimental results and comparisons with the state-of-the-art methodologies. In contrast, the journal rankings are merely decided based on the number of journal articles, which has been read and cited by various readers in a specific year, in correspondence to its previous publication counts. Though this mere number cannot be easily acquired by a journal, there are chances for a journal to be more read than the rest because of the theme it holds. A scientific journal with more numerical explanations can have a smaller number of readers than the one with theoretical explanations. It cannot be said that the former journal kind has less impact on readers. Instead, it can be said to impact fewer number of readers with ample scientific and numerical background. Despite all these facts, the journal ranking and the article quality are found to be intermingled in one sense- “A quality research can certainly increase the journal’s readability and IF; A high IF journal can certainly be used as a mode to deliver the quality research”. Hence, publication in high IF journals can be of greater significance as the journals do take efforts to provide quality articles to its readers, but article ranking based on IF alone cannot be encouraged.
How IF journals influence the authors?
Having a publication in a high IF journal is now the desire of almost all the authors. Though IF is said to rank a journal, there are certain things that it can offer to an author and they are:
Research trustworthiness, since almost all the IF journals will have many rounds of peer-review to accept an article to be credible and to confirm that it has not been generated from fake online systems
Quality research, since the IF journals usually maintain a highly-proficient reviewing board to direct and accomplish quality research for the future
More citation counts, since the journals are ranked only based on their readership ability in a specific field of knowledge
Career improvements, since a candidate with high IF publication is honoured high during an interview or research tenure
Collaboration with broader research networks, since almost all the readers of IF journals have wider connectivity to numerous research contributors across the globe
Funding priority, when their research proposals have IF publication records
Hence, The Research Seer’s Rationale on the necessity of Impact Factor Journal Publications is:
“Intend IF publications for Intense Reach of Quality Research”
“Intend IF publications for Intense Reach of Quality Research”
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