Citation opportunity cost of the high impact factor obsession

good papers are usually recognized quickly by the scientific community, often achieving citation rates higher than those of high-impact journals. Furthermore, the strict page limits of high-impact journals can force authors to omit valuable information [1], sometimes reducing the reach and citation rate of a paper. A rejection also forces a scientist to spend time revising and resubmitting, instead of working on new papers. The rejection–resubmission cycle sometimes demoralizes a scientist sufficiently that the paper is never published. Many of these papers have valuable ecology, natural history and life history data, often from the developing world, that are essential for improving the biodiversity databases and the global analyses based on them [7]. To calculate the opportunity cost in citations as a result of delayed publication, I analyzed my first-authored papers that were first submitted to a high-impact journal and rejected. For each paper, there is a linear or quadratic relationship (r 2 > 0.97) between years since publication and its number of citations in Google Scholar. If I had submitted each paper only to the journal it was published in, this would have resulted in an earlier publication date and more time to accrue citations. I calculated this opportunity cost. For example, the equation Citations = 2.3 * YEARS 2 + 12.7 * YEARS – 3.9 (r² = 0.996) describes the relationship between years since publication and number of citations of my most cited paper [7]. If I had first submitted this paper to the journal where it was eventually published in and had not lost time due to rejections and resubmissions, it would have been published 1.27 years earlier and would have accumulated approximately 70 more citations. On average, each resubmitted paper accumulated 47.4 fewer citations by being published later, with an overall opportunity cost of 190 lost citations. I also calculated the difference between my papers' citations and the median number of citations for ecology research articles published in my first-choice, high-impact journal in the year I published each paper. Each of my papers received more citations than 64–78% of comparable papers and received 44 more citations, on average, than the papers with median The pressure to publish in high-impact journals has never been higher and has led to growing distortions in the use of the impact factor [1,2]. With increasing quantification of scientific impact and the growing dependence on easily-calculated statistics — for example, impact factors, the …