After a lot of painstakingly-hard work, researchers publish their papers in reputed journals. There is a huge number of journals worldwide. For the same reason, research published in a very small group of journals can be blindly trusted as authentic and well-founded. This is due to mushrooming of predatory journals, which needs to be weeded out by the scientific community.
However, partly due to the predatory journal problem, getting published in few journal and publication houses has become a ground for ‘measuring’ and ‘certifying’ the quality of research. If a paper is published in a journal with a high impact factor, the general reaction is “Congratulations! it’s a nice work!”.
A “good paper”, however, requires a ground breaking, and meaningful research work and if you are able to hit where it counts, you ought to be recognized very well and you will get appreciated by the research community. BUT! the question arises here that “Are you being recognized for your wonderful work or for getting your research published in high impact journal!?”.
The answer may be “both”, and it may not sound significant but there is a huge difference between all possible answers to that question. There is nothing wrong when you share your published article on a social media platform and get congratulated with compliments like “Congratulations! The impact factor is very good!”, or “Congrats!”. People may cheer you up for the implied quality based on journal’s name and reputation, but in the research community what must matter is the “content” itself.
There are many social networking platforms to share your work with the researcher community, where people are expected to read the content and appreciate the work or comment with its applications, improvements, and suggestions. Each and every publication contributes toward the research irrespective of where it appears on the scale of appreciation.
This trend may also lead to an increase in expectations and demand for publications from the budding research scholars in order to get their degrees. But still, instead of forgetting the real spirit of research or science, we should continue cheering up our scholars, and only after reading their papers should we say “Congrats! it is a nice work!”
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