This year my dean, for the first time ever, required all the science faculty to report the impact factor of each journal in which we had published a paper.
When I saw this requirement it hit me: Our little regional university is undoubtedly the last to catch up with this trend. The vast majority of AJP's authors have surely been under the thumbs of bean-counting administrators1 for many years. And that means I owe those authors an apology.
You see, throughout my recent five-year stint as AJP's associate editor, and my many years as a reviewer2 before that, I just never understood that the criterion for accepting a paper should be not whether other readers will use it, but whether other authors will cite it.3 Similarly, I never realized that AJP should expect its authors to cite as many other AJP papers as possible—relevant or not4—in order to help our other authors run up their citation counts and h-indexes. Preferably these citations should be to papers published within the previous two years,5 so they'll count toward AJP's all-important impact factor.
I sincerely apologize to all AJP authors whose careers have been held back by my thoughtlessness.
