Scholarly Quality Measurements: A Systematic Literature Review

The academic publishing landscape is rapidly evolving, making quality assessments and impact evaluations of scientific papers increasingly challenging. Understanding the respective methods is crucial for maintaining the integrity, quality, and relevance of academic publishing in such a changing environment. In this paper, we investigate existing quality-assessment methods for scientific papers, as well as their advantages and disadvantages. For this purpose, we conducted a systematic literature review to capture a comprehensive overview of existing methods, which led to 43 papers and 14 methods. Specifically, we analyze their usage, strengths, and weaknesses, in addition to potential avenues for enhancements. The results can support researchers by providing the knowledge to navigate through quality-assessment methods to make evaluations concerning the reliability and suitability of diverse methods within a specific scientific context.