Is publishing in high impact journals the key to career progression?

Our structure (research) Impact of our research Postgraduate research 05 Dec 2014 Economists working in academia are being advised to think twice before publishing in high impact journals. That's according to new research led by Professor Dan Rigby, of The University of Manchester, and published in the American Journal of Agricultural Economics, which examined whether careers were most enhanced by publishing in high impact journals. The key findings were the lack of relationship between journals' impact factors and the perceived career payoffs from publishing in them. Professor Rigby and his team of economists also found that authors don't believe that publishing in journals with a high societal impact will best advance their career, despite recent attempts to incorporate impact into research assessments. He said: "While many exponents of citation-based approaches argue that they have the advantages of being robust and objective, we found that impact factors also bore little or no relation to the hierarchy of journals, as perceived by researchers themselves. The only citation metric which did correlate with the perceived career impacts of publishing in journals was 'Article Influence'. The findings culminates research carried out with over 900 environmental and agricultural economics researchers, internationally, to directly elicit their perceptions of the relative standing of 23 leading journals using two criteria: enhancing career progression, impact beyond academia (ie.