Q: How is the impact of publication evaluated during the review of grant-in-aid application?
Regarding the list of publications to be provided during the application for Grant-in-aid for scientific research ('KAKENHI' in Japanese), which points are evaluated? Is the impact factor or the number of citations focused on as the evaluation criteria? If yes, should the publications at journals with lower indexes (i.e., lower impact factor or number of citations) be omitted from the list?
During the review of a grant-in-aid application, the number of publications is given improtance along with other factors such as the reputation and impact factor of the journal in which you have published the paper, the nature and significance of the results (breakthrough results will of course be given priority), etc.
Often, the impact factor of the journal in which you have published is given preference as a higher impact factor indicates a superior quality of research and impact factor provides the relative importance of a journal within its field. However, that does not necessarily mean that you should exclude articles published in lower impact factor journals. This is because the chances of receiving a grant are greater when you have a longer publication list, even if some of the articles are published in low impact factor journals.
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