All professionals active in the scientific arena are familiar with the ‘Impact Factor’, an indicator of the relevance of publications, which considers the number of citations every published paper gets in the two years following its publication.  But should we be evaluating scientific contributions in this way?

The wave of criticism of the Impact Factor started ten years ago with the Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA), a document created in 2012 at the annual meeting of the American Society for Cell Biology. The declaration aims to “improve the ways in which researchers and the outputs of scholarly research are evaluated” and specifically calls for doing away with Impact Factors as a way to judge the merit of academics. So far, it has been signed by nearly 20,000 individuals and institutions.

Utrecht University signed the document in 2019. At that time, Anton Pijpers, the president of the university’s executive board, said that signing DORA wasn’t a “symbolic step” but “a ‘pledge’ for which UU can be held accountable.”1

Utrecht will not be standing alone in its efforts to change the way researchers are evaluated, says Lynn Kamerlin, a computational biochemist at Uppsala University in Sweden. “As open science becomes more and more important in policy and decision-making surrounding research funding and strategies, I think it will almost be a necessity for institutions to follow suit,” says Kamerlin, who is a member of a European Union group that published a 2019 report on ways to evaluate researchers’ contributions to open science.1

Of note, the Academy features a webinar on Open Science as part of its course in Medical Affairs.

You can read the full text here.

References

  1. Woolston, C. (2021, July 15). University Drops Impact Factor. Nature. https://media.nature.com/original/magazine-assets/d41586-021-01759-5/d41586-021-01759-5.pdf

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