The 2012 San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DoRA) represents a commitment by individual scientists, funders and institutions to adopt a sophisticated approach to the assessment of research quality, including avoiding the use of Journal Impact Factors. It states that decision-makers should "For the purposes of research assessment, consider the value and impact of all research outputs (including datasets and software) in addition to research publications, and consider a broad range of impact measures including qualitative indicators of research impact, such as influence on policy and practice". It also states that publishers should "Make available a range of article-level metrics to encourage a shift toward assessment based on the scientific content of an article rather than publication metrics of the journal in which it was published."
In order to support this, an initiative has been trialling digital taxonomies that should enable researchers to clearly identify the nature of contributions to papers. A comment piece in Nature outlines initial analysis and an ongoing consultation and development approach for the following taxonomy of roles
- Study conception
- Methodology
- Computation
- Formal analysis
- Investigation: performed the experiments
- Investigation: data/evidence collection
- Resources
- Data curation
- Writing/manuscript preparation: writing the initial draft
- Writing/manuscript preparation: critical review, commentary or revision
- Writing/manuscript preparation: visualization/data presentation
- Supervision
- Project administration
- Funding acquisition
Allen, L., Scott, J., Brand, A., Hlava, M. & Altman, M. (2014) Publishing: Credit where credit is due. Nature 508, 17 April 2014 312-313.doi:10.1038/508312a
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