The N-pact factor: Evaluating the quality of empirical journals with respect to sample size and statistical power

Abstract

The authors evaluate the quality of research reported in major journals in social-personality psychology by ranking those journals with respect to their N-pact Factors (NF)-the statistical power of the empirical studies they publish to detect typical effect sizes. Power is a particularly important attribute for evaluating research quality because, relative to studies that have low power, studies that have high power are more likely to (a) to provide accurate estimates of effects, (b) to produce literatures with low false positive rates, and (c) to lead to replicable findings. The authors show that the average sample size in social-personality research is 104 and that the power to detect the ..