The past few weeks have clearly been very successful as far as prizes go :) Just today I found out that I am one of the recipients of the 2019 IOP Publishing Outstanding Reviewer Awards for the British journal Classical and Quantum Gravity (CQG)!
Every year IOP journals, including CQG, select a handful of “Outstanding Reviewers”, in recognition of the high quality and timeliness of their reviews during the year. I reviewed 7 papers for CQG since 2019 (more precisely, since July 2019), with an acceptance rate of 29%, in line with my average acceptance rate for the top journals in the field. The award winners have been published here. As I wrote in my Publications section, peer review is an integral part of my professional activity; I believe in the value and importance of timely and quality peer review, and am always eager to perform peer reviewing activity (you can see my Publons profile for more details on my peer reviewing activity).
To me this award means a lot because CQG is one of my favorite journals, as well as one of my favorite publication venues for the theoretical gravitation side of my research. The reason I love CQG so much is precisely the very high quality of their peer reviewing process. Papers submitted to CQG are refereed by a minimum of 2 (and sometimes 3) reviewers, and possibly also by an Editorial Board member if reviewers offer conflicting advice (it happened once with a paper I submitted). This is very important because it goes a long way towards partly removing the elements of randomness and luck which peer review inevitably, to some extent, suffers from. Papers sent to CQG are also always read extremely carefully by the referees, often down to the single equations, and whether or not the final decision is positive or negative, the reports are always extremely useful and comprehensive (something which definitely cannot be said for most journals). I have never once received an useless report from CQG (again, something which I cannot say for most other journals). I am extremely happy I managed to live to their high refereeing standards, which is precisely one of the aspects I most love about this journal.
Besides their high refereeing standards, the journal is a leader in the fields of relativity and quantum gravity. Something I often hear from people is that CQG’s impact factor (IF) of 3.5 is lower than PRD (4.4) or JCAP (5.5). In my opinion, besides the fact that the IF is not an useful number to begin with, comparing the IFs of CQG with PRD and JCAP is like comparing apples to oranges. CQG inevitably publishes more theoretical research which is less “hot” and cited less (or more slowly). On the other hand, PRD and JCAP publish many data analysis papers. Data analysis papers are usually hotter, but at the same time often surprisingly incorrect or useless (with data analysis papers it is relatively easy to publish incremental work, which boosts the IF of a journal accordingly but adds little to the field). So, comparing these journals is not exactly fair, for the same reason one should not compare h-indexes of researchers across vastly different disciplines (e.g. physics vs sociology). Theoretical papers are cited much more slowly, but have more potential to lead to a non-incremental leap in research.
One should judge the quality of the paper itself, not the journal it is published in. The journal IF is perhaps more relevant for career advancement and so on, but in the long run of science it is completely irrelevant. As an example, do not forget that the most cited paper in theoretical physics, The Large N limit of superconformal field theories and supergravity by Maldacena with 15500 citations at the time of writing, was published in International Journal of Theoretical Physics, with a staggering 1.1 as IF!