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Usually for the journals we have impact factor and for the conferences we have acceptance rate.

Now, is it possible to guess the acceptance rate of a journal using its impact factor ? For example, for this journal:

https://www.journals.elsevier.com/computers-and-security/call-for-papers/special-issue-on-blockchain-and-cryptocurrency

whose impact factor is 2.650

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  • You really don’t need to put everything in quotes, and please don’t use code formatting to represent quotes. I’ve removed that formatting. Jul 15, 2018 at 12:14
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    In a general sense, the answer is "no". Different fields have wildly different citation rates and hence impact factors, so that will vary independently of the level of prestige of the journal. Within a field, I suspect it's still "no", but it might be interesting to hear if anybody's studied it.
    – Flyto
    Jul 15, 2018 at 17:58
  • You can probably email the Editor in Chief for this info. Some times the EiC writes a summary of how well the journal went for a given year, and he/she may quote the acceptance rate. Jul 16, 2018 at 10:41
  • Voting to leave open as it isn't actually off-topic.
    – Flyto
    Jul 20, 2018 at 10:39

4 Answers 4

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In a general sense, the answer is "no". Different fields have wildly different citation rates and hence impact factors, so that will vary independently of the level of prestige of the journal. Within a field, I suspect it's still "no", but it might be interesting to hear if anybody's studied it.

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This is like guessing a person's salary from their postal code. There may or may not be some correlation, but any prediction for an individual journal is bound to be far enough off that the prediction will be entirely useless for any practical purpose - and this is without taking into account that acceptance rates are a fairly useless metric to start with.

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Intuitively, we would expect "yes"; according to a study by Frontiers in 2015 however the answer is "no".

Caveat: it doesn't look like a very rigorous study. In particular it is lacking controls for different fields.

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I would like to point out the fact that many researchers (not all) are relatively self-aware when it comes to the perceived quality of their manuscripts. In this sense, they try to aim for journals with relatively suitable prestige (in this case, its impact factor). This results in a balancing effect in which journals receive more papers in tune with their level of perceived prestige and it causes less variance between acceptance rates than one might think because high impact journals would not receive as many low impact manuscripts.

If all papers were submitted to all journals, then there would be a direct correlation between the impact factor and the acceptance rate. This is not the case.

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