I recently read this FAQ that explains a bit about impact factors. After reading, I was curious... what would be some reasons why researchers would use papers from a low-impact factor journal, say, a journal with IF = 1?
Wouldn't all researchers concentrate their efforts on starting their literature search from the highest impact factor journals, and then develop their new work on this basis? That seems logical to me and also most beneficial to a researcher's career in academia.
The question is unclear, but let me try to answer anyway.
You assume that for any given field of science, there exist journals with high impact factors. This ignores the specifics of individual fields. In very basic sciences, impact factors are usually high, because many researchers from other fields will use the findings in their own for. For example a researcher from the field of neurology will be cited from the people from neurology, psychology, psychiatric medicine, artificial intelligence, computer science.
On the other hand, more niche the field becomes, smaller is the pool of the scientists that could use the results. While a computer scientist may cite the paper from neurology to reference certain brain structure that inspired his algorithm or massive processing cluster architecture, there is basically no way that the neurology scientist would cite the aforementioned computer scientist.
That's why there are huge differences among fields regarding the impact factor of the top journals in the category.
Does this mean that the paper on some novel computing architecture is less valuable? Certainly not. While very few computer engineers working in R&D of new commercial computer systems will be interested in neurology, quite a few of them will read the paper on novel, more efficient architecture of massive computer clustering.
However, since they are end-users, their reads will not transform in citations, while significant proportion people that read advanced neurology paper will publish papers on their own and perhaps eventually cite it somewhere (because they are scientists, in that essence, not end users).
What would be some reasons why researchers would use papers from a low-impact factor journal, say, a journal with IF = 1?
Researchers use papers that are relevant to their research, regardless of where they've been published. Being published in a less prestigious journal doesn't mean the result is less true - it usually means the paper is seen as less significant, usually because the authors/referees/editors think fewer people will be interested in the result.
But sometimes those people are wrong, and a paper is more significant than it appeared, and sometimes the paper may be obscure but it has exactly the thing you need for the work you're doing.
(Also, IF values vary dramatically by field. The top journals in my subfield have impact factors between 0.6 and 0.7, so an impact factor of 1 doesn't sound low-impact to me at all.)
Wouldn't all researchers concentrate their efforts on starting their literature search from the highest impact factor journals, and then develop their new work on this basis? That seems logical to me and also most beneficial to a researcher's career in academia.
No, they wouldn't. Indeed, if everyone else were doing that, a researcher could get a big advantage by being the only person mining paper published in low impact-factor journals for ideas that other people were overlooking. In my experiences, researchers skim pretty broadly, looking for papers that might suggest new ideas or ways to advance their work, and I've never heard of anyone restricting their reading to the journals with higher impact factors.
Wouldn't all researchers concentrate their efforts on starting their literature search from the highest impact factor journals, and then develop their new work on this basis?
No. My literature searches start at DuckDuckGo, Google, Google Scholar and maybe my institution's library search. I don't even know the impact factors of the venues of the papers I end up reading.
If the papers (or books, or blog posts, or Stack Exchange Q&A) I find are relevant, I will read them, regardless of impact factor.
This question is very open and will probably generate a lot of answers. Here's two important reasons I see:
Because if they didn't, nobody would've heard of the Krebs cycle yet, one of the most important discoveries in biochemistry. It was famously rejected from Nature, and instead published in an obscure little Dutch journal called Enzymologia. Luckily, the Nobel Prize committee didn't care about impact factor ;-)
In addition to the excellent points made in the prior answers, consider the issue of originality as a requirement for article acceptance.
A professor who selects based on relevance etc. will know if a line of research has already been covered by articles in low impact journals, and avoid duplicating what has already been published. A professor who only reads articles in high impact journals could waste a lot of time duplicating prior research, and getting articles rejected for lack of originality.
I understand that you meant "Why would a researcher read papers from low-impact journals?"
In many research areas, articles are communicated (and read) well before they are published, for example by means of preprint servers such as arXiv. In this case, the reputation of the journal to which a certain article has been submitted/accepted can be used as some simple indicator for the quality of the research.
Since impact factor is essentially an attempt to measure journal reputation, this implies that articles submitted/accepted for low-impact-factor journals tend to be regarded less.
However, IMHO few researchers explicitly use impact factor to select their reading list, rather they judge from several factors, journal reputation being only one (others are the reputation of the authors, as well as the interest generated from reading the title and abstract).
Note also that, in particular for interdisciplinary journals such as Nature and Science, impact factor may not correlate with good quality articles. This is because these journals tend to select not on quality alone, but also on potential impact. Now, unfortunately, a wrong/marginal result can have a huge impact, since if it were true that would have dramatic consequences (IMHO, a substantial fraction of articles in aforementioned journals fall into this category).
What you are proposing here is a circular self-sustaining system where the impact factor of a journal could never increase because no one would cite it. This, coupled with the occasional digging for hidden and/or forgotten gems of research means that there is good reason to use those resources too.
And let us not forget: Impact factor says very little about both validity and value of the contained work. Not directly, anyway.
