This spawned a debate in the lab; how important is a journal’s impact factor, anyway? In this age of on-line journals and internet publication searches, is a particular paper really more likely to be seen by others (ie. have more impact) by being published in one particular journal rather than another? Surely, an important result will be seen by anyone interested in that particular field, no matter what (accessible) journal it happens to be in. Papers in high impact journals are there, in theory anyway, because they are deemed to be of interest to a wider audience than workers in that particular field. This begs two questions: does the work do more to advance the field than if published in a more specialized venue, simply by the fact that it is in such a journal? Secondly, is the appeal to “general readership” a better criterion of high quality work than to readers knowledgeable in that field?