kelly0303 said:
What do you mean by different field? Isn't Nature a physics journal, too?
No, Nature covers all fields of scientific enquiry, including biology and medicine, which contribute a lot to the high impact factor.
kelly0303 said:
I know for a fact that publishing a physics paper in Nature is a lot more complicated than in PRL so I was wondering why? Is it because of their impact factor? And if so, why does Nature has a bigger impact factor than PRL? And if not, why is it harder to get published in Nature?
Nature publishes very few physics papers (around 3 per issue), so they can be very picky. In fact, they are very picky in all fields: they would much rather reject an excellent paper than accept one that turns out to be not very good (although they have made some blunders: look up Benveniste).
Looking at their physics-only journal, Nature Physics, its impact factor is 20, which is more than PRL. There again, they are very picky about the articles they publish, as they can use the Nature brand to attract big papers (there is also the trickle-down effect, where papers rejected by Nature often end up submitted to Nature Physics).
It is important to understand the role of the impact factor. It is an indicator of the
average relevancy of papers published in a journal, as it gives an idea of how much people are citing recent articles in that journal. It is useful as a reader to know to make a quick assessment of the possible validity of an article (in a field where one is less familiar) as it gives and indication of how well it has (probably) been peer-reviewed. If the JIF is low, there is reason to be skeptical, as it is probably a journal that published anything. Other than that, the JIF doesn't mean that much (outside of the publishing business).
