This is an accepted manuscript of an article due to be published by Emerald in Journal of Documentation. The accepted version of the publication may differ from the final published version.Purpose: Scholars often aim to conduct high quality research and their success is judged primarily by peer reviewers. Research quality is difficult for either group to identify, however, and misunderstandings can reduce the efficiency of the scientific enterprise. In response, we use a novel term association strategy to seek quantitative evidence of aspects of research that associate with high or low quality. Design/methodology/approach: We extracted the words and 2–5-word phrases most strongly associating with different quality scores in each of 34 Unit...