How much impact has the impact factor?

Excerpt

When we as authors plan to publish a paper, one major question is in which journal the paper should be published. One aspect of the choice of journals is the impact factor (IF), as indexed in the Journal Citation Reports, which usually serves as a proxy for the relative importance of a journal within its field. For many, it remains unclear how this famous IF is reached and what it actually means. The IF of an academic journal is a measure reflecting the number of citations of articles published in that specific journal. Journals with higher impact factors are considered to be more important than those with lower ones. …