Impact of Social Sciences – When are journal metrics useful? A balanced call for the contextualized and transparent use of all publication metrics

Impact of Social Sciences – When are journal metrics useful? A balanced call for the contextualized and transparent use of all publication metrics

The Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) has yet to achieve widespread institutional support in the UK. Elizabeth Gadd digs further into the slow uptake. Although there is growing acceptance that the Journal Impact Factor is subject to significant limitations, DORA feels rather negative in tone: an anti-journal metric tirade. There may be times when a journal metric, sensibly used, is the right tool for the job. By signing up to DORA, institutions may feel unable to use metrics at all. The recent Metric Tide report recommended that institutions sign up to the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA). DORA was initiated by the American Society of Cell Biology and a group of other scholarly publishers and journal editors back in 2012 in order to “improve the ways in which the outputs of scientific research are evaluated”. Principally, it is a backlash against over-use of the Journal Impact Factor to measure the research performance of individual authors or individual papers, although its recommendations reach further than that. Subsequent to the publication of DORA, the bibliometric experts at CWTS in Leiden published the Leiden Manifesto (April 2015). This too is set against the “Impact Factor obsession” and offers “best practice in metrics-based research assessment so that researchers can hold evaluators to account, and evaluators can hold their indicators to account”. There is no option to sign up to this.