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The TOP factor: An indicator of quality to complement journal impact factor

For decades, articles about journal quality or prestige have been published with some regularity (Highhouse et al., 2020). Through such publications, the quality or prestige of journals, and supposedly the articles therein, are being communicated to the field at large. Consequently, when selecting which journals and articles to read, scholars tend to choose the ones with a high quality or prestige rating and omit the ones with a low one (Aguinis et al., 2020). The location in which an article is published is one of the best predictors of citations for that article regardless of topic or other factors such as rigor (Judge et al., 2007; Nosek & Bar-Anan, 2012). Implied in these quality or prestige assessments is that both terms are essentially synonymous; that prestige is essentially the same as quality (Highhouse et al., 2020). In support of this notion, the journal impact factor (JIF), maybe the premier index for judging journal prestige and quality in I-O psychology, management, and related disciplines, tends to correlate highly with qualitative assessments (e.g., expert or member ratings) of journal prestige and quality (Highhouse et al., 2020). Although severe shortcomings of the JIF have been well documented (e.g., Larivière & Sugimoto, 2018), it continues to be the premier measure of journal quality. Similarly, subjective assessments of quality are bound to be affected by, in addition to the JIF and other metrics (e.g., h-index; Hirsch, 2005), idiosyncratic biases (e.g., journals in which one has published or reviewed). Regardless of all of these and other problems with journal rankings, they tend to be published and used to make decisions about journal and—by inference—article quality. However, it seems as though indices such as the JIF and other ratings of journal quality may not necessarily assess quality but, instead, assess popularity. Indeed, the JIF assesses popularity quite explicitly by its very definition. After all, journals with a higher JIF tend to publish articles on popular topics that are easy to cite, such as articles on “hot” topics or articles with a substantial amount of “theory” or complex statistical approaches (e.g., metaanalytic structural equation modeling) as opposed to articles that are methodologically or statistically rigorous. Although articles with very complex models may appear impressive (e.g., with six variables in a model across levels of analysis), reanalysis has indicated that the theoretical probability of such models is unlikely (Saylors & Trafimow, in press). Therefore, instead of journal quality, journal popularity may be a more accurate term for indices such as the JIF and similar metrics and rankings of journal quality. The very definition of popularity illustrates the overlap with impact or prestige, which have been considered to be synonymous with quality in the literature (Highhouse et al., 2020). Popularity denotes the degree of visibility, prestige, or impact of an entity within a peer group (Lansu & Cillessen, 2012). Entities with a high popularity tend to be seen as popular by many and as unpopular by very few. Indices such as the JIF and subjective journal rankings are likely to be, on some fundamental level, assessments of popularity. However, are there potential problems if our journal quality assessments are actually measuring journal popularity instead of quality? Ideally,