The relationship between journal rejections and their impact factors – ScienceOpen Blog

"Frontiers recently published a fascinating article about the relationship between the impact factors (IF) and rejection rates from a range of journals. It was a neat little study designed around the perception that many publishers have that in order to generate high citation counts for their journals, they must be highly selective and only publish the ‘highest quality’ work. Apart from issues involved with what can be seen as wasting time and money in rejecting perfectly good research, this apparent relationship has important implications for researchers. They will tend to often submit to higher impact (and therefore apparently more selective) journals in the hope that this confers some sort of prestige on their work, rather than letting their research speak for itself. Upon the relatively high likelihood of rejection, submissions will then continue down the ‘impact ladder’ until a more receptive venue is finally obtained for their research. The new data from Frontiers shows that this perception is most likely false. From a random sample of 570 journals (indexed in the 2014 Journal Citation Reports; Thomson Reuters, 2015), it seems that journal rejection rates are almost entirely independent of impact factors. Importantly, this implies that researchers can just as easily submit their work to less selective journals and still have the same impact factor assigned to it. This relationship will remain important while the impact factor continues to dominate assessment criteria and how researchers evaluate each other (whether or not the IF is a good candidate for this is another debate) ..."