Researchers strategically choose where to submit their work in order to maximize its impact, and these publication decisions in turn determine venues' impact factors. To analyze how individual publication choices both respond to and shape venue impact, we introduce a game-theoretic framework, coined the Publication Choice Problem, that captures this two-way interplay. We show the existence of a pure-strategy equilibrium in the Publication Choice Problem and its uniqueness under binary researcher types. Our characterizations of the equilibrium properties offer insights about what publication behaviors better indicate a researcher's impact level. Through equilibrium analysis, we further investigate how labeling papers with ``spotlight'' affects the impact factor of venues in the research community. Our analysis shows that competitive venue labeling top papers with ``spotlight'' may decrease the overall impact of other venues in the community, while less competitive venues with ``spotlight'' labeling have the opposite impact.

翻译：研究者为最大化其工作影响力，会策略性地选择投稿目标期刊或会议，而这些发表决策反过来又决定了出版物的影响因子。为分析个体发表选择如何响应并塑造期刊影响力，我们引入了一个博弈论框架，称为“发表选择问题”，用以捕捉这种双向互动关系。我们证明了发表选择问题中存在纯策略均衡，并在二元研究者类型下证明了其唯一性。对均衡性质的刻画揭示了哪些发表行为能更好地反映研究者的影响力水平。通过均衡分析，我们进一步探讨了为论文标注“亮点”如何影响研究社区中期刊的影响因子。分析表明，竞争性期刊对顶尖论文标注“亮点”可能会降低社区内其他期刊的整体影响力，而竞争性较低的期刊采用“亮点”标注则会产生相反的影响。