One of the most important issues facing scholarly communication today is what constitutes quality in the publishing and dissemination of research findings; the aim of this exploratory research study was to investigate author‐perceived quality characteristics of science, technology and medicine journals. We triangulated data from a small number of volunteer full‐time faculty members of Long Island University, using three different research techniques: (1) questionnaire survey, (2) focus groups, and (3) semi‐structured face‐to‐face interviews. The study identified some significant differences by discipline, gender, and tenure status. Overall, the three most important attributes were the reputation of the journal, the estimated length of time to article publication, and the readership of the journal. Our findings bring new insight into this area for the scholarly research community as a whole.