It is time to fix research evaluation - Open Science MOOC

Joint post by Paola Masuzzo, Lonni Besançon, and Jon Tennant.

As children, we are taught “Don’t judge a book by its cover”. Yet, when it comes to evaluation of scholarly research, this is often exactly what we do. In 1997, an article was published entitled “Why the impact factor of journals should not be used for evaluating research”. Yet, twenty years later, this metric is still pervasively used for research assessment, and closely tied to the quality of articles and their authors, as has been recently reported for North America and across parts of Europe.

We do not understand this. There is no theoretical, ethical, or empirical basis for this system of evaluation. The three of us are early career researchers, and we are deeply concerned. It should not be up to us to compensate for the lack of leadership and responsibility demonstrated by senior academics, who should be doing research evaluation with the same rigour they perform their research.

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