Thoughts on academic life (3)- The Q1 Journal Fetish

Episode 3: The Q1 Journal Fetish

Episode 1- The Performance of Transparency

Episode 2 – The Theater of Scholarly Collegiality

A colleague proudly announced his latest publication, adding Q1 even before the title. I see self-promotional Instagram posts that mention the Q number, mostly Q1.

This moment crystallized something I’ve observed throughout my career in Turkish academia. However, the phenomenon extends far beyond Turkey’s borders: we have developed what I can only call a fetish for journal rankings, particularly the mystical Q1 designation—journals in the top quartile by impact factor. Q1 journals represent the top 25% of publications in a field, as measured by citation metrics, and typically garner ratings of 9 or 10 out of 10 for their significance. Yet somewhere along the way, this category marker transformed from a rough quality indicator into an all-consuming obsession.

In Türkiye, this obsession takes on particular intensity. Conversations with colleagues reveal universities where Q1 publication requirements for promotion have become nearly insurmountable barriers, especially in fields where Turkish scholars face inherent disadvantages—language barriers, limited access to international research networks, and topics that may not interest editors of “international” (read: Anglo-American) journals.

The irony is bitter: we claim to value scholarly excellence while creating systems that incentivize quantity over quality, that reward gaming metrics over genuine contribution, that privilege narrow technical papers over synthesizing work that might actually advance understanding.

I favor the moments when I was excited with a journal itself without thinking about its classification.

The Reductionist Turn

Publishing in Q1 journals has become the “pinnacle of academic success,” with research institutions using Q1 publications as key metrics for evaluating research productivity and making decisions about promotions, tenure, and academic positions. In Turkey, this is particularly acute. A book chapter published by a respected academic publisher counts for less in most universities’ evaluation systems than an article in a Q1 journal. The message is clear: prestige resides not in the depth of your contribution, but in the quartile ranking of where you publish it.

This journal-based assessment has a fundamentally flawed logical structure: the belief that if a paper is published in a high-impact-factor journal, it must be of high quality—a premise that conflates journal prestige with article merit. The highly skewed citation distributions within journals—where the majority of papers receive far fewer citations than the journal’s average—demonstrate that the journal impact factor cannot serve as a reliable indicator of individual article quality.

A colleague’s article in a Q2 journal offered genuinely innovative theoretical contributions. Another colleague published in Q1—a technically competent but conceptually derivative study that essentially confirmed what we already knew with slightly different data. Guess which publication our university’s evaluation committee valued more highly?

The Reality Behind the Rankings

Critics point out that the impact factor is “meaningless as a predictive measure”—that is, publishing in a high-impact journal does not necessarily mean a paper is more likely to be cited—and that its opacity in calculation makes it a dubious metric for quality assessment. Nature magazine has criticized the over-reliance on impact factors for not just statistical flaws but also negative effects on science, noting that the resulting pressures “can encourage sloppy research that fails to test assumptions thoroughly or to take all the data into account before submitting big claims”.

A few popular papers can drastically skew a journal’s impact factor calculation, as the metric is simply an average—in the majority of journals indexed, about 70% of papers are cited fewer times than the journal’s average. Yet we treat this deeply flawed average as if it were a precise measurement of scientific value. One third of social science articles going uncited suggests we’re producing vast quantities of work that our own colleagues don’t find worth engaging with.

The Book Chapter Problem

The systematic undervaluation of book chapters reveals the metrics system’s intellectual impoverishment. The distinction between primary and secondary literature is relevant here: books typically synthesize and build on primary research, offering broader arguments and deeper contextual depth that journal articles cannot provide. In fields like history, anthropology, and cultural studies, some of our most influential work appears in edited volumes, yet our evaluation systems treat these contributions as second-class scholarship.

I think about the book chapters I’ve written—pieces that synthesized years of fieldwork, that made connections across literatures, that were explicitly invited because of my expertise. In the meantime, I don’t even include one of my Q1 articles in my selected publications section (!)

The Need for Evaluation—But Better

I acknowledge the genuine problem: we do need methods to evaluate scholarly work. The old system of purely subjective assessments by senior colleagues had its own pathologies—favoritism, nepotism, the reproduction of existing hierarchies. Utrecht University’s 2021 decision to abandon all quantitative bibliometrics, including the impact factor, met with resistance from academics who argued that while imperfect, such metrics remain useful, and their omission “will lead to randomness and a compromising of scientific quality”.

But the solution cannot be reducing complex intellectual work to a single number. Alternative approaches include the Leiden Manifesto and the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA), which advocate for transparent workflows, accessible research results, and moving away from journal-based metrics toward evaluating work on its own merits.

Document-level metrics that capture how research is read, downloaded, shared, commented upon, and saved provide evidence of nascent influence and serve as complementary measures of impact beyond simple citation counts. But no single metric can tell the full story—we also need to consider awarded grants, teaching activities, mentoring efforts, community engagement, and the actual intellectual contribution of the work itself.

What Gets Lost

When I read work by senior scholars who built their careers before the metrics obsession—people who published fewer papers but papers that mattered, who wrote books that shaped fields, who took intellectual risks—I’m struck by what is sacrificed now. The current system doesn’t reward depth. It doesn’t reward innovation that takes time to develop. It doesn’t reward intellectual courage.

Moving Forward

Like my previous episodes on hiring transparency and collegial performance, this reflection doesn’t offer easy solutions. The metrics have become so embedded in our evaluation systems, so tied to funding and career advancement, that individual resistance feels futile.

But perhaps naming the problem—recognizing how profoundly reductionist and intellectually limiting our current system has become—is a necessary first step. Perhaps we can begin conversations about what we actually value in scholarly work, how to evaluate genuine contribution rather than publication counts, and how to build systems that encourage depth rather than volume.

The Q1 fetish reflects a broader crisis in how we understand and reward intellectual work. Until we address this crisis directly, we’ll continue producing mountains of papers while genuine knowledge advances at a crawl.

References/ Further Readings

Callaway, E. (2016). Beat it, impact factor! Publishing elite turns against controversial metric. Nature, 535(7611), 210-211.

Larivière, V., & Sugimoto, C. R. (Various). Research on journal impact factors and citation distributions.

Remler, D. (2014). Are 90% of academic papers really never cited? Reviewing the literature on academic citations. LSE Impact Blog.

San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA). (2013). https://sfdora.org/

Smolcic, V. S. (2013). Salami publication: Definitions and examples. Biochemia Medica, 23(3), 237-241.