When the English philosopher Herbert Spencer introduced the phrase “survival of the fittest” in 1864, he could not have imagined that it would summarize the plight of young scientists years later (1). As competition for coveted faculty appointments and research funding continues to intensify, today’s researchers face relentless pressure to publish in scientific journals with high impact factors. But only a few decades ago, when I began my scientific career as a virologist in the 1970s, the common outlets in my field were journals that specialized in virology. Work that straddled disciplines was often published in journals catering to a broad readership. Most researchers read and published articles with little regard to the purported impact of the journals themselves. Faculty appointments, promotions, and the award of research grants were often largely based on perceived future impact of the work, not on whether the research was published in so-called “high-impact” journals.
Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 81 citations exist upstream.