  The Journal Impact Factor and other indicators that assess the average
citation rate of articles in a journal are consulted by many academics and
research evaluators, despite initiatives against overreliance on them. Despite
this, there is limited evidence about the extent to which journal impact
indicators in any field relates to human judgements about the journals or their
articles. In response, we compared average citation rates of journals against
expert judgements of their articles in all fields of science. We used
preliminary quality scores for 96,031 articles published 2014-18 from the UK
Research Excellence Framework (REF) 2021. We show that whilst there is a
positive correlation between expert judgements of article quality and average
journal impact in all fields of science, it is very weak in many fields and is
never strong. The strength of the correlation varies from 0.11 to 0.43 for the
27 broad fields of Scopus. The highest correlation for the 94 Scopus narrow
fields with at least 750 articles was only 0.54, for Infectious Diseases, and
there was only one negative correlation, for the mixed category Computer
Science (all). The results suggest that the average citation impact of a
Scopus-indexed journal is never completely irrelevant to the quality of an
article, even though it is never a strong indicator of article quality.
