Plenary Session Presentations

why do authors select certain journals for their best papers?

First, congratulations for the organization of this virtual biomedical meeting.
I am taking the opportunity of this free worldwide discussion to adress the following topic:
the use of the Impact factor of scientific journals for the evaluation of quality of papers and of people.
Obviously, to reach the largest diffusion of results, authors are submitting their papers in the journals of highest impact, and then go down the impact list in their resubmission process...
It appears that in some countries this impact factor is now used to classify the papers published in good papers, for example published in journals of an impact factor highest than 3, and bad, in journals of impact factor lowest than 3. Accordingly researchers and university scientists can be recruited or not on the basis of this discriminative limit.
I would be happy to hear from authors from different biological and medical specialties about their opinion on this hot topic!
How do you see the evolution of these attitudes in the era of electronic journals?

Thu Dec 10