My supervisor talks about Impact Factors constantly. I often have my work edited to include 'big' names in the field. Is this common? Should I be worried that this is not 'good science', or should I be happy that my supervisor is training me to be a strategist?

Your supervisor is right and wrong. He is right in a way the big names is what you should associate with in your writing. They will always have substances for you to learn from. But he is wrong to go after IFs. IF is not a good way to judge the quality of an article. You will always find big names publishing in even journals with smaller IFs.'Big'names is the name of the game.

Hey! I think IFs are important to some degree if someone is looking at your CV for example, and can see that you have publications in journals with high impact factors. I think most people know the vague ranking of the journals in their own discipline according to IFs. Of course, you can have an article in a high IF journal that never gets cited, or one in a low IF journal that gets cited hundreds of times- you can't really judge an individual paper on where it's published- but it still looks good to have your papers accepted in well-regarded journals, instead of always going for the lower-ranked journals that will accept articles of a much lower standard. I think everyone has a different opinion on the value of IFs! KB

As someone once told me, it's not about how often that journal tends to get cited, it's about how often your paper gets cited. There's defintely something to be said for publishing in lower impact journals if that's where other researchers tend to publish work on your topic. Same goes for open access journals - the more people that can read it, the better. If your paper gets cited 20 times, no-one is gonna care where it was published.