Closed access publishing still dominates the publishing world. The system may be bad, and the progress towards open access is a good thing but choosing not to publish your work in the highest impact factor journal can be a career suicide. Many countries explicitly include impact factors of your publications to allocate jobs and grants. You can’t deny that there is a very strong correlation between the impact factor of the journals in which your peers have published and their success in landing jobs and grants.
But Impact factor alone will not help you in getting a job and grants, even grant review committees ignores the impact of journal in which you published and focus exclusively on the quality of the science that you do. However, scientists are so conditioned about impact factors that most design their experiments, and write their papers to get their work published into the journal with highest possible impact factor.
High impact publications can make a difference in landing you in to a job or getting you grants, other factors that play into these decisions are letters of recommendation, how effectively you communicate in an interview and, most importantly, the quality of your science.
Getting jobs and grants is a competitive process in which the quality of an individual scientist’s previous work and future plans are evaluated. Getting your paper published generally evaluates your quality work and its overall impact in science and society. It is foolishness to conclude that it is the journal in which your work gets published, rather than the quality of your work that plays the dominant role in determining your success in scientific research.
Many academic articles in almost all fields are never cited, and fields related to plants can never have impact factors as high as those of engineering and technology but still most scientists and academicians, emphasize on bagging the highest impact factor journal for their research work. Therefore while you try to publish your research work in journals with high impact but you should also work upon the quality of your science and personal grooming.
But Impact factor alone will not help you in getting a job and grants, even grant review committees ignores the impact of journal in which you published and focus exclusively on the quality of the science that you do. However, scientists are so conditioned about impact factors that most design their experiments, and write their papers to get their work published into the journal with highest possible impact factor.
High impact publications can make a difference in landing you in to a job or getting you grants, other factors that play into these decisions are letters of recommendation, how effectively you communicate in an interview and, most importantly, the quality of your science.
Getting jobs and grants is a competitive process in which the quality of an individual scientist’s previous work and future plans are evaluated. Getting your paper published generally evaluates your quality work and its overall impact in science and society. It is foolishness to conclude that it is the journal in which your work gets published, rather than the quality of your work that plays the dominant role in determining your success in scientific research.
Many academic articles in almost all fields are never cited, and fields related to plants can never have impact factors as high as those of engineering and technology but still most scientists and academicians, emphasize on bagging the highest impact factor journal for their research work. Therefore while you try to publish your research work in journals with high impact but you should also work upon the quality of your science and personal grooming.
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