A nice paper HERE by Björn Brembs, Katherine Button and Marcus Munafò called "Deep impact: unintended consequences of journal rank". Go download it.
Their Abstract reads:
Most researchers acknowledge an intrinsic hierarchy in the scholarly
journals (“journal rank”) that they submit their work to, and adjust not
only their submission but also their reading strategies accordingly. On
the other hand, much has been written about the negative effects of
institutionalizing journal rank as an impact measure. So far,
contributions to the debate concerning the limitations of journal rank
as a scientific impact assessment tool have either lacked data, or
relied on only a few studies. In this review, we present the most recent
and pertinent data on the consequences of our current scholarly
communication system with respect to various measures of scientific
quality (such as utility/citations, methodological soundness, expert
ratings or retractions). These data corroborate previous hypotheses:
using journal rank as an assessment tool is bad scientific practice.
Moreover, the data lead us to argue that any journal rank (not only the
currently-favored Impact Factor) would have this negative impact.
Therefore, we suggest that abandoning journals altogether, in favor of a
library-based scholarly communication system, will ultimately be
necessary. This new system will use modern information technology to
vastly improve the filter, sort and discovery functions of the current
journal system.
And their Conclusions
While at this point it seems impossible to quantify the
relative contributions of the different factors influencing the
reliability of scientific publications, the current empirical literature
on the effects of journal rank provides evidence supporting the
following four conclusions: (1) journal rank is a weak to moderate
predictor of utility and perceived importance; (2) journal rank is a
moderate to strong predictor of both intentional and unintentional
scientific unreliability; (3) journal rank is expensive, delays science
and frustrates researchers; and, (4) journal rank as established by IF
violates even the most basic scientific standards, but predicts
subjective judgments of journal quality.
The following Figure from their paper shows (A) Exponential fit for PubMed retraction notices (data from pmretract.heroku.com) and (D) Linear regression with confidence intervals between Impact Factor and Retraction Index (data provided by Fang and Casadevall, 2011).
