Prestige Does not Equal Quality: Lack of Research Quality in High-Prestige Journals

Abstract

Publishing in high-prestige journals is a top priority on most researchers’ to do list, especially if they are early in their career or want to get or keep a job, get tenure, get promoted, or build a reputation in their field. This seems to be a sound strategy, as one might say that selection, promotion, and tenure committees always count, but they don’t always read (e.g., Aguinis et al.,2019). That is, the criteria by which a researcher’s output and quality of work is assessed is by the journals in which they have published and by the impact factors that these journals have accrued at the time of the author’s publication rather than by the actual content of the work (e.g., Addo, 2017). Publ..