Impact Factors, citations bla bla...

As the competition in academics is getting tougher and tougher due to recession, fund cuts or whatever, it seems to me that certain things like "journal impact factor", "number of citations" etc have become very very important and grabbing more attention than ever. Though I am just a beginner in this field, I feel as if I have started hearing more about these keywords nowadays than I did say, four five years back. Anyways, I guess independent of any personal experiences, it is the overall trend these days. Earlier, if someone has a paper in a journal like Physical Review D, nobody would care about the present impact factor of this prestigious journal. But, with the journal market growing bigger and bigger (and flooded with many open access journals whose sole target is just to publish articles based on the money author gives, rather than the quality of the work), the race towards high impact factor has become more and more visible. Like my PhD supervisor, I never paid much attention to these things as long as we get one or two papers per year in a reputed journal like Physical Review D. I was also unaware of the mechanism which governs the impact factor. But as expected, things like impact factor plays non-trivial role in getting you a job. And that's when I had to search for the impact factors of the journals where I got some papers published. In my job applications I had to write clearly the impact factors of all the journals. I don't know how much that did help me getting a job, but I always hope that my favorite journals like Physical Review among a few others  will maintain their quality always and people wont be caring much about their impact factors, their very names would carry their impact rather than some real numbers known as impact factor which results from some data analysis. Recently, I saw the list of journal impact factors for the year 2011. And I saw some tables showing the number of citations each journal has got in that year and depending on that, the impact factors were ordered (roughly speaking). There were couple of surprises in that table (I hope I dint look at a fake one). For example Physics Letters B impact factor has decreased substantially from around 5 to around 3.5. To a less extent Physical Review D and JHEP impact factor also decreased. Journals like IJMPA, EPJC has somewhat maintained the same impact factor as before, but MPLA impact factor seems to have decreased. Anyways, to conclude the last few lines, all the familiar journals to hep-ph community (at least) have lost their impact factors to some extent. That's heartbreaking indeed. However,  I saw one journal whose impact factor seems to have increased a lot, that's journal of physics G. It's current impact factor is around 4.something. I am sure it was lower than this earlier. Obviously, it has got enormous number of citations as well. That made me think how come a journal in which  I hardly see any paper related to hep-ph can get such a huge number of citations. I had no clue, and I dint even bother to find out. But while reordering the bibliography of a paper I am writing, suddenly I saw one paper in this journal which I am citing. And yes, as expected that's the particle data group (PDG) paper published in 2010 which has around 4000 citations now. So, that's how it works. Even if a journal does not have a significant number of articles important to myself or hep-ph in general compared to other popular journals, even a paper with such huge citations in a year or so can make a big difference. Anyways, I hope I won't get driven into such a race of impact factors and would be ignoring these issues consistently throughout my life and hope my present favorite journals will always remain favorite to me :)