I am generally inclined to regard IF arguments for disregarding research as rather disingenuous. Yes, there are predatory journals which will publish anything i

I am generally inclined to regard IF arguments for disregarding research as rather disingenuous. Yes, there are predatory journals which will publish anything if paid, but IF as a metric to judge a journal which doesn't seem to be obviously fraudulent is a farce at best, because IF is also heavily correlated with readership which may not be large for relatively niche topics (to be fair, I haven't actually looked at other articles in EJN). For example, consider Annals of Mathematics, one of the most "prestigious" math journals, has an IF of 3.027. I'm not trying to claim anything about the science in this particular article because I haven't read it in enough detail but a PI I worked with had this habit of dismissing research based on journal IFs, which was pretty annoying.