Slight Dilemma - (Jan/28/2015 )

Dear all

I am a relatively new postdoc researcher who has submitted a journal and was notified that thematically it was not a good fit to the initial journal. The editor recommended another journal which is rather new (i.e. with no impact factor at the moment). They have stated that the editorial board of that other journal would be willing to accept my manuscript for consideration for publication (pending reviewers' comments).

My supervisor believes that it is a good piece of work, and publishing it into a journal with an unknown impact factor will not be good for my academic career. However, I feel like if we submit the manuscript to this journal, it will bypass the editorial board and head straight to the reviewers, which I think will pretty much guarantee an acceptance. 

I am certain a lot of readers out here have experienced something like this. I just would like to know what is possibly detrimental about postdocs/academics submitting to journals without impact factors.

Thanks all

Lab Nerd.

see, for many years PNAS had no impact factor, nevertheless it was considered as a high rank journal; however, if you cannot estimate the quality of the new launched journal, you better try an established one

Labnerd: "However, I feel like if we submit the manuscript to this journal, it will bypass the editorial board and head straight to the reviewers, which I think will pretty much guarantee an acceptance."

This is precisely you should not submit to the journal. Just as you think you can bypass the process, other people will think you probably bypassed the process and paper was otherwise not much worth. Go with your supervisor's advice. Believe in your work.

First it's an obvious way how to start a new journal (who would publish in noIF these days, if it's good enough to have one) through good connections between editors, not necessarily a way how to bypass something (why would the editorial board say no to a paper, that was recommended by a fellow editor from another journal, that only has a "thematic" objection about it?).

And second, as long as it doesn't bypass the reviewers, I see no problems there as well. Editors can be good and bad and arrogant if you don't have a name or very friendly if you have one, often based a lot more on a "politics" than the paper quality and on how good they slept last night. Lots of journals will send paper stright to reviewer after good recommendation of someone with a name.

If editor pushes a paper against the reviews not because of the science but frenhships/hatreds, chooses a reviewer that would give an expected report (likes the theory in general or loudly opposes it, if it's controversial), then it is bad. 

But thinking everybody has everywhere the same oportunities for editors eye is a bit naive.

But editors aside. If you need IF in your grant report, then you have to go with IF. Sadly most people kind of do. Only when they can't get one, they will go lower. Some scientists with Nature papers were recently writing about how the freedom is to publish in open-access even if they have lower IF, which is a nice thing to say from people, that have more citations than rest of the room combined. Unfortunately if the funding is strictly based on IF then you can do this with data otherwise non publishible.
But in other countries only number of papers count, or speed of them, so that may be a different situation.

Why would you want to publish in a journal that is new and has no IF, when you could possibly publish in a reputed journal? Since the first journal has rejected your paper only because it didn't match the journal's scope, it is possible that your paper is of good quality and would be deemed publication worthy by other journals. This is your first publication: a good start will help establish your credibility in the field.  Follow your supervisor's advice and submit to an established journal