How faculty define quality, prestige, and impact of academic journals

Abstract

Despite the calls for change, there is significant consensus that when it comes to evaluating publications, review, promotion, and tenure processes should aim to reward research that is of high "quality," is published in "prestigious" journals, and has an "impact." Nevertheless, such terms are highly subjective and present challenges to ascertain precisely what such research looks like. Accordingly, this article responds to the question: how do faculty from universities in the United States and Canada define the terms quality, prestige, and impact of academic journals? We address this question by surveying 338 faculty members from 55 different institutions in the U.S. and Canada. While relying on self-reported definitions that are not linked to their behavior, this study's findings highlight that faculty often describe these distinct terms in overlapping ways. Additionally, results show that marked variance in definitions across faculty does not correspond to demographic characteristics. This study's results highlight the subjectivity of common research terms and the importance of implementing evaluation regimes that do not rely on ill-defined concepts and may be context specific.

Fig 1. Use of “Impact factor and metrics” as a definition of various terms.

Percentage of responses that contained at least one segment in participants’ definitions of High Quality, Prestige and High Impact that relies on “Impact Factor and metrics”, as a proportion of all the RPT guidelines that mentioned the JIF and of the guidelines that did not.