Universities have become too enamored with journal impact factors. These factors are supposed to indicate journal quality. They are used heavily in evaluating the research of scholars, espcially at the time when professors are evaluated for tenure and promotion. But the impact factor of a journal is a bad measure of its quality. This is quite obvious when one looks at distritbutions of citations of journals. This post has an excellent discussion. H/T to Joerg Fliege for posting this link on Google+, where I saw it.
Journal citation distributions
The curious incident of DD on the Web 