Your contention that “It is possible to judge journals without using impact factors, and indeed I think most scientists do that” is the ultimate source of our disagreement. In my view journal names, reputations and impact factors are so entangled in people’s minds that I’d say most scientists automatically (and perhaps even unconsciously) conflate them. Maybe that’s a perspective unique to the molecular life sciences.

The key point that I suspect we are all agreed on is the need to shift the focus away from the journal, to the paper -- the work itself. However you assess a journal’s impact, impact factor or reputation, that overall assessment is always an average of some sort that should not be applied to individual publications. That is the thrust of my piece and the SF declaration.

Leaving Stephen aside for a moment, my contention at least is that it’s judging papers by venue that is most fundamentally wrongheaded. Whether that judgement-by-venue involved impact factor or something different is a relatively minor issue. Yes, impact factor is a crappy measure even for evaluating journals. But that’s not what exercises me.

It’s astonishing to see the claim “Whether journal prestige is assessed by Impact Factor or some other metric is of very little importance here.” on a post with the title “Impact factors declared unfit for duty”.

The issue is that papers (and therefore researchers) are routinely assessed not by their content but by their venue. Doing so is a mistake, plain and simple. It gives the wrong results, and rewards the wrong behaviour.

The other phrases that you do mention, ‘quality of the journals’ and ‘first rate journals’ re-inforce the impression that the location of publication is the most important factor under consideration, rather than the work itself

Fine, but you’re shifting the goalposts. You wrote “Which means of course that they put significant weight on impact factors when assessing their staff.”, but no mention of impact factor was made: I didn’t ignore “higher impact journals”, and indeed checked to see if it said “higher impact factor journals”. It didn’t.

Now you’re retreating to arguing against “the location of publication is the most important factor under consideration”, which is not the same issue.

There is no dog whistle in play here — or if there is, it’s one that everyone can now hear. The not-so-subliminal message sent out by documents like this (and practice now common across the world) is that the name of the journal where you publish is more important than what you do. It is for that reason that people concerned about the misuse of impact factors (or their surrogate — journal names) have come together to formulate the SF declaration.

The broader point — which I agree is more interesting and challenging — I have discussed at length elsewhere.

It’s like judging Ryan Giggs to be a bad footballer because he pays for Wales, which is a bad footballing country.

No, Giggs has little choice over which nation to play for. But one does chose which journal to submit to, and the journal chooses which papers to accept. So perhaps a better analogy might be that Giggs plays for Man U, who he has chosen to play for, and they have chosen to let him play for them.

The broader point is more interesting, I think, but you only mention it in passing in the post.

Here is my homepage -- Skywatcher Explorer 130P

Committee members should instead delegate their evaluation to all of the true experts in the core field of the assessed publication, who might have read that publication anyway during their routine research activities. Each scientist reads thoroughly, on average, about 88 scientific articles per year, and the evaluative information that scientists can provide about these articles is currently lost. Aggregating in an online database reviews or ratings on the publications that scientists read anyhow can provide important information that can revolutionize the evaluation processes that support funding or hiring decisions.

For this to work, scientists should publicly share ratings and reviews of the papers they read anyway. Spending 5 minutes to rate a paper that has just been read would save a couple of hours for each committee member who is later tasked to evaluate that paper, for which of the several committees that assess that paper.

You may already start sharing ratings and reviews of the papers that you read on Epistemio, a website that I have founded, at http://www.epistemio.com .

You may read more about this at http://doi.org/mjr (R. V. Florian (2012), Aggregating post-publication peer reviews and ratings. Frontiers in Computational Neuroscience, 6 (31).). You may rate or review this paper at http://www.epistemio.com/p/pj0X34Ek .