Is There a Relationship between Impact factor and Rejection Rate?
Several parts get to play once deciding wherever a manuscript ought to be submitted for publication. Of course, the topic space of the study should match into the scope of the journal beneath consideration; but, added thereto, the Impact Factor, risk of acceptance, and speed of call appear to be vital criteria for many authors. Impact Factor plays a distinguished role as several researchers—including members of institutional committees, WHO decide regarding funding, awards, and promotions—believe that studies revealed in high-impact-factor journals, that have terribly high rejection rates, have a big impact within the knowledge domain that’s being studied. Also, having a paper revealed during a high Impact Factor journal is taken into account to be difficult, and so those authors WHO get revealed in such journals will attract a lot of funding and collaborations.
Relating Impact Factor and Rejection Rate
In 2015, the open access publisher Frontiers during a report declared that prime rejection rates were ascertained from several journals that have low impact factors. For this report, the impact factors of 570 willy-nilly elect journals that were indexed in the 2014 Journal Citation Report were obtained and aforethought against their publically declared rejection rates. supported the information, there looked as if it would be “absolutely no correlation” between the 2 parameters. However, the figure provided in the report isn’t significantly informative. In fact, the names of the journals area unit missing and therefore the criteria accustomed choose these 570 publications from over 8000 science journals and over 3000 science journals indexed by JCR isn’t clear. supported the report revealed by Frontiers, the diary quantized has shared a separate analysis that has some names of the journals and impact factors listed out one by one.
The primary drawback within the report shared by Frontiers is that the lack of relationships within the knowledge. within the report, the subsequent problems were noticed:
Journals from arithmetic, statistics, and design, that typically don’t attract that several citations, were compared with those from areas corresponding to materials science, applied science, or drugs.
The report doesn’t distinguish between languages (a journal revealed in English can likely have a better Impact Factor than a Portuguese or a German journal, that includes a terribly tiny audience).
The report doesn’t distinguish between open access and subscription publications.
In response to the comments of scientists WHO allotted an analogous study in 2008, finding a transparent correlation between the impact factors and rejection rates of ecology publications with impact factors on top of one.76—the authors of the Frontiers comment set to publish a second post during which they normalized the impact factors by field (arts and humanities, life sciences and biomedicine, physical sciences, social sciences, and technology). withal, examination a contact action publication with associate degree astronomy journal still doesn’t build an excessive amount of sense (although they each belong to the physical sciences). Besides, different factors, corresponding to totally different languages or the publication of general reviews versus specialised analysis, area unit still not thought of. a lot of significantly, the sample solely includes five-hitter of all the journals indexed by JCR.
Scope and Quality
So, though the rejection rates area unit terribly high for a few journals, the explanations area unit typically quite simple: a) restricted publication house, b) scope of the journal, and c) quality of the papers. The house issue is especially true for superior journals, that receive more manuscripts than they will publish and so typically do have high rejection rates, however the scope and quality problems also can have an effect on low-impact-factor journals. simply because a publication includes a low Impact Factor, it doesn’t publish all the manuscripts it receives. If a number of them don’t seem to be ok or don’t match at intervals the scope of the journal, the editors and/or referees would possibly arrange to reject them.
Understanding Impact Factor
Despite all the issues mentioned on top of, the report by Frontiers may well be the place to begin for attention-grabbing discussions. A study revealed in 2006 for radiology journals suggests that it may even be right in some cases. though impact factors mustn’t be accustomed decide promotions or funding as a result of they are doing not mirror the standard of individual papers during a journal, however before drawing any general conclusions regarding the connection between impact factors and rejection rates, a lot of complete and systematic study is needed.