A stand against the misuse of citation metrics

Apart from the urge to establish priority, career advancement is a major force in motivating scientists to write and publish. Scientists publish research papers and usually append to a given paper a list of other published papers relevant to the subject of that paper—on these two facts rests the whole edifice of scientometrics, the science of measuring and analysing scientific research. The by-products of scientometrics include citation indexes and impact factors, the most widely known being the journal impact factor. The convenience of having a simple metric is irresistible to science administrators, which gives the journal impact factors its clout. However, scientists themselves are increasingly wary of such metrics. A recent manifestation of this concern is DORA, the Declaration on Research Assessment, signed so far by more than 10,000 scientists and more than 400 institutions.   

The declaration is a set of recommendations “to improve the ways in which the output of scientific research is evaluated by funding agencies, academic institutions, and other parties.” Apart from one general recommendation calling on all parties not to use “journal-based metrics, such as Journal Impact Factors, as a surrogate measure of the quality of individual research articles, to assess an individual scientist’s contributions, or in hiring, promotion, or funding decisions”, the remaining 17 recommendations are addressed to different categories: 2 are meant for funding agencies, 2 for institutions, 5 for publishers, 4 for organizations that supply such metrics, and 4 for researchers.

The declaration was the result of a gathering of editors and publishers of scholarly journals concerned with the issue, who met on 16 December 2012 during the annual meeting of the American Society for Cell Biology (ASCB) in San Francisco.

Recommendation no. 16 is something that you, as an individual researcher, can implement right away: “Wherever appropriate, cite primary literature in which observations are first reported rather than reviews in order to give credit where credit is due.” The details on signing up for the declaration can be found on DORA's website. 

For further reading, here is another article that discusses impact factor and DORA: The advance and decline of the impact factor.