Validity of Basing Authors' Publication Strategy on Journal Impact Factors

Abstract

Choosing the best scientific venue for the submission of a manuscript, with the aim of maximizing the impact of the future publication, is a frequent task faced by scholars. In this paper, we show that the Impact Factor (IF) of a journal allows to rationally achieve this goal. We take advantage of a comprehensive bibliographic and citation dataset of about 2.5 million articles from 16,000 journals, and demonstrate that the probability of receiving more citations in one journal compared to another is a universal function of the IF values of the two journals. The relation is well described by a modified logistic function, and provides an easy-to-use rule to guide a publication strategy. The benefit of publishing in a journal with a higher IF value, instead of another with a lower one grows slowly as a function of the ratio of their IF values. For example, receiving more citations is granted in 90\% of the cases only if the IF ratio is greater than \(\sim\)6, while targeting a journal with an IF 2\(\times\) higher than another brings in marginal citation benefit.