Journals play a critical role in the scientific process because they evaluate the quality of incoming papers and offer an organizing filter for search. However, the role of journals has been called into question because new preprint archives and academic search engines make it easier to find articles independent of the journals that publish them. Research on this issue is complicated by the deeply confounded relationship between article quality and journal reputation. We present an innovative proxy for individual article quality that is divorced from the journal's reputation or impact factor: the number of citations to preprints posted on arXiv.org. Using this measure to study three subfields of physics that were early adopters of arXiv, we show that prior estimates of the effect of journal reputation on an individual article's impact (measured by citations) are likely inflated. While we find that higher‐quality preprints in these subfields are now less likely to be published in journals compared to prior years, we find little systematic evidence that the role of journal reputation on article performance has declined.

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在学术搜索引擎和预印本档案时代，科学期刊仍然很重要

期刊在科学过程中起着关键作用，因为它们评估传入论文的质量并为搜索提供组织过滤器。然而，期刊的作用受到了质疑，因为新的预印本档案和学术搜索引擎可以更容易地找到独立于发表文章的期刊的文章。由于文章质量和期刊声誉之间的复杂关系，对这个问题的研究变得复杂。我们提出了独立于期刊声誉或影响因子的单个文章质量的创新代理：arXiv.org 上发布的预印本的引用次数。使用这种方法来研究 arXiv 早期采用者的物理学的三个子领域，我们表明期刊声誉对单个文章的影响的先前估计 s 影响（通过引用衡量）可能被夸大了。虽然我们发现与前几年相比，这些子领域的高质量预印本现在不太可能在期刊上发表，但我们发现几乎没有系统证据表明期刊声誉对文章表现的作用已经下降。