Publishing in Low Impact Journals

 

When you decide to publish your findings in a low impact journal for reasons of fast publishing or open access option it can undermine how readers and reviewers evaluate your findings. Impact factors” are important to some, especially to some funding agencies, but the importance is exaggerated. The impact factor is not necessarily a measure of a good a journal.

What matters is the content and vitality of the result. I assure you that there are more active researchers who stopped sending their results not only to high impact factor journals but completely abandoned the notion of journals because of their behaviors, treating scientists as naive in their fields and like sales person of their works. Some of the high impact factor journals make the entire process so tiresome and difficult for researchers that they prefer other journals. In some cases it has been found that the final published copy is almost entirely different from the original manuscript just because the journal didn’t find it as per their norms.

In developing countries, sometimes top ranked journals are not cited by the researchers, but lower ranked journal’s articles are more preferred as they are easily available. Open access articles are always getting more citations because of their reach to the researchers.

A good research will always get recognition irrespective of the journal it has been published with. The real value of the article is in its content not in where it appears. Open access journal is a good media to propagate your message to the largest numbers of your peers.

The most important thing should be to publish good research, first and foremost, and not concentrate on where it is published. Except that you should publish where you know that the right people will find it. Publishing mediocre papers just to get a long list of papers in ones CV is a waste of one’s talents. Writing only a few papers that actually provide answers to important problems must in the long run be more important and better than to publish a lot of mediocre work. Good findings are good findings, regardless where they are published. Thus, publishing in low impact journals does not affect the quality of research findings.

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