"Short scenarios were created using the positive and negative aspects of journal characteristics. Each scenario describes a situation in which one is confronted with an imaginary scientific journal. The journal is described briefly based on the aforementioned characteristics. A total of eight scenarios were created (all available in Table A2 and in Table S3 at https://osf. io/vf3tx/), combining all the positive and negative aspects of the three characteristics (Table 3). An example of a single scenario with two positive and one negative characteristic (Scenario 4) is presented in Table 4."

"all main effects and interactions are s tically significant, with large effect sizes for the main effects and two-way interactions, and a medium effect size for the three-way interaction (Cohen 1988). Each positive journal characteristic significantly increased perceived credibility. When two or three positive features were combined, an interaction effect occurred whereby the shift in the journal's credibility was additionally strengthened, i.e., it was greater than the cumulative effect of the individual characteristics (Figure 1). The post hoc Tukey HSD test shows that most scenario pairs differed significantly in credibility ratings."

"The effect of publishing expectations was statistically significant: scholars with higher publishing expectations (HPE) gave lower credibility ratings than scholars with LPE, suggesting a more critical evaluation. However, the effect size was small (ηₚ 2 = 0.014). No significant difference was found between [social science] and [humanities] scholars. The number of positive characteristics had a large effect on credibility ratings, with a greater number of positive characteristics leading to notably higher credibility ratings. As illustrated in Figure 2 , this increase follows an exponential trend, consistent with the interaction effects shown in Figure 1, where combinations of positive attributes enhance credibility beyond the sum of the individual attributes."

"The correlation between [reflection test] scores and the average rating across all scenarios was negative and low, but statistically significant (Table 8), suggesting that more reflective participants tended to rate journals more critically. Specifically, a significant negative correlation was obtained for journals with zero or one positive journal characteristics and at the same time with three or two negative attributes. However, the ratings of journals with two and three positive attributes did not correlate with the [reflection test]." "Exploratory Factor Analysis ...yielded a two-factor solution accounting for 59.39% of the total variance. Component 1 (eigenvalue of 3.593) explained 44.91% of the variance, whilst Component 2 (eigenvalue of 1.158) explained 14.48%. The structure matrix (see Table 9) shows that Component 1 included low-quality journals, and and Component 2 included high-quality journals. Journals with mixed characteristics loaded on both components"