FLICKR, ELVERT BARNESA declaration asking that the research community pay less attention to impact factor now has 484 signatures, 87 of them from institutions and 397 from individual members of the scientific community. Impact factor is calculated by Thomson Reuters based on academic journals’ citation rates, as a measure of prestige. The document, called the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA), asks that scientists, funding bodies, and others stop using the number as “a surrogate measure of the quality of individual research articles.”
DORA, set into motion at the Annual Meeting of The American Society for Cell Biology (ACSB) in December and spearheaded by the society, argues that, within journals, most citations are likely to come from relatively few papers and so the aggregate impact factors do not reflect an individual paper’s merit. Impact factors also vary by field and don’t differentiate between review papers and original research. And the emphasis encourages editors to enact policies to drive up their impact factors, sometimes artificially, the declaration said.
The declaration also asks that measures of research impact be transparently calculated and openly available for anyone to use. Thomson Reuters currently has not explained its full methodology and its data require permission to use.
“We, the scientific community, are to ...
