Bibliometrics: The Leiden Manifesto for research metrics : Nature News & Comment

"...Yet the abuse of research metrics has become too widespread to ignore. We therefore present the Leiden Manifesto, named after the conference at which it crystallized (see http://sti2014.cwts.nl). Its ten principles are not news to scientometricians, although none of us would be able to recite them in their entirety because codification has been lacking until now. Luminaries in the field, such as Eugene Garfield (founder of the ISI), are on record stating some of these principles3, 4. But they are not in the room when evaluators report back to university administrators who are not expert in the relevant methodology. Scientists searching for literature with which to contest an evaluation find the material scattered in what are, to them, obscure journals to which they lack access.

We offer this distillation of best practice in metrics-based research assessment so that researchers can hold evaluators to account, and evaluators can hold their indicators to account...."