Science Policy: the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA)

The San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) was developed at the American Society for Cell Biology meeting in late 2012.  It argues for the elimination of journal impact factors in assessing scientists in funding, appointment and promotion decisions.  In addition to the many US signatories, HEFCE and Wellcome have signed. The themes of the recommendations are summarised as..../

• the need to eliminate the use of journal-based metrics, such as Journal Impact Factors, in funding, appointment, and promotion considerations;
• the need to assess research on its own merits rather than on the basis of the journal in which the research is published; and
• the need to capitalize on the opportunities provided by online publication (such as relaxing unnecessary limits on the number of words, figures, and references in articles, and exploring new indicators of significance and impact).

Bruce Alberts, in a Science editorial, discusses the negative impact of metrics on innovation and risk taking in new areas of science: new areas of science are relatively sparsely populated with fewer papers consequently fewer citiations.  He says "the leaders of the scientific enterprise must accept full responsibility for thoughtfully analyzing the scientific contributions of other researchers. To do so in a meaningful way requires the actual reading of a small selected set of each researcher's publications, a task that must not be passed by default to journal editors".