The Responsible Research Assessment Initiative - The Official PLOS Blog

"PLOS is delighted to once again partner with the Einstein Foundation Award for Promoting Quality in Research. The awards program honors researchers who reflect rigor, reliability, robustness, and transparency in their work. The Einstein Foundation received dozens of stellar submissions. We asked this year’s finalists to write about their research in the run up to the ceremony on March 14th in Berlin. This is the second blog in our 5-part series....

In recent years, a consensus emerged in the scientific community that evaluating scientific performance solely based on quantitative indicators (such as number of publications, number of first authorships, h-index, journal impact factors) is inadequate. The shift towards prioritizing research quality, transparency, robustness, and reproducibility is evident in initiatives like the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) and the Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment (CoARA).

Despite these efforts, hiring and promotion procedures at universities as well as funding decisions still heavily favor easily measurable quantitative indicators over assessing scientific work’s quality. A survey within the German Psychological Society highlights the disproportionate emphasis on publication numbers and funding, neglecting crucial quality criteria (Abele-Brehm & Bühner, 2016)...."