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

" ... In 2005, Jorge Hirsch, a physicist at the University of California, San Diego, proposed the h-index, popularizing citation counting for individual researchers. Interest in the journal impact factor grew steadily after 1995 (see 'Impact-factor obsession'). Lately, metrics related to social usage and online comment have gained momentum — F1000Prime was established in 2002, Mendeley in 2008, and Altmetric.com (supported by Macmillan Science and Education, which owns Nature Publishing Group) in 2011. As scientometricians, social scientists and research administrators, we have watched with increasing alarm the pervasive misapplication of indicators to the evaluation of scientific performance. The following are just a few of numerous examples. Across the world, universities have become obsessed with their position in global rankings (such as the Shanghai Ranking and Times Higher Education's list), even when such lists are based on what are, in our view, inaccurate data and arbitrary indicators. Some recruiters request h-index values for candidates. Several universities base promotion decisions on threshold h-index values and on the number of articles in 'high-impact' journals. Researchers' CVs have become opportunities to boast about these scores, notably in biomedicine. Everywhere, supervisors ask PhD students to publish in high-impact journals and acquire external funding before they are ready. In Scandinavia and China, some universities allocate research funding or bonuses on the basis of a number: for example, by calculating individual impact scores to allocate 'performance resources' or by giving researchers a bonus for a publication in a journal with an impact factor higher than 15 (ref. 2). In many cases, researchers and evaluators still exert balanced judgement. 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 ..."