High impact factors are meant to represent strong citation rates, but these journal impact factors are more effective at predicting a paper’s retraction rate.

"[T]he number of retractions has increased at about 400-fold the rate of publication increase. The authors of this study, Fang and Casadevall, were so nice to provide me with access to their data....[The correlation between IF and retractions] already looks like a much stronger correlation than the one between IF and citations. How do the critical values measure up? The regression is highly significant at p