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Impact factor is a really simple measure to determine roughly how important a journal is. It’s calculated by taking the number of times a journal was cited by other journals in a two year period and dividing it by the total number of articles. When it comes to impact factor, Nature, Cell, and Science account for a quarter of the top 2,100 most-cited articles in all of science.Impact factor is often one of the only measures that university faculty look at when considering the quality of a researcher’s work—an overly simple measure that means it matters more about where you publish rather than what you publish. The trend toward specialization in science, which makes it difficult to assess quality outside of one’s expertise, makes impact factor an easy, if not ideal, way to do it.“Relying on publication in highly selective journals as a surrogate measure of quality provides a convenient, if intellectually lazy, alternative to attempting to read and understand a paper outside one’s specialty,” Casadevall wrote.The same thing happens in journalism. Everyone wants their stories or research to be read and considered important, and that’s more likely to happen at a place like the New York Times than it is at a small local paper, regardless of how good the article is. That doesn’t mean that incredible work doesn’t happen at a small paper, and it doesn’t mean that every article at the New York Times is worthy of a Pulitzer. But solid work is much more likely to get noticed at a big place—the Natures of the world—than it is at smaller journals.Impact factor is often one of the only measures that university faculty look at when considering the quality of a researcher’s work.
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