Scientists, journal editors and publishers, scholarly societies, and research funders across many scientific disciplines have posted an international declaration calling on the world scientific community to eliminate the role of the journal impact factor (JIF) in evaluating research for funding, hiring, promotion, or institutional effectiveness. The San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment, or DORA, was framed by a group of journal editors, publishers, and others convened by the American Society for Cell Biology (ASCB) in December 2012 in San Francisco, during the Society's Annual Meeting.
The San Francisco group agreed that the JIF, which ranks scholarly journals by the average number of citations their articles attract in a set period, has become an obsession in world science. Impact factors warp the way that research is conducted, reported, and funded. Over five months of discussion, the San Francisco declaration group moved from an 'insurrection,' in the words of one publisher, against the use of the prominent two-year JIF to a wider reconsideration of scientific assessment.
The DORA statement makes 18 recommendations for change in the scientific culture at all levels - individual scientists, publishers, institutions, funding agencies, and the bibliometric services themselves - to reduce the dominant role of the JIF in evaluating research and researchers and instead to focus on the content of primary research papers, regardless of publication venue.
The declaration is timed to coincide with editorials in scientific journals worldwide including an endorsement of DORA by Bruce Alberts, Editor-in-Chief of Science Magazine in the journal's May 17th issue. Other editors signing DORA represent Journal of Cell Biology (JCB), Traffic, Genetics, eLife, Journal of Cell Science, Aging Cell, Molecular Biology of the Cell (MBoC), BioArchitecture, The EMBO Journal, Journal of Cell Science, Journal of Surfactants & Detergents, Cell Structure & Functions (Japan), Lipids, Genes, Journal of the Electrochemical Society, and Development. A complete list of signatories to date is available at http://www.ascb.org/SFdeclaration.html.
The San Francisco declaration cites studies that outline known defects in the JIF, distortions that skew results within journals, that gloss over differences between fields, and that lump primary research articles in with much more easily cited review articles. Further, the JIF can be 'gamed' by editors and authors, while the data used to compute the JIF 'are neither transparent nor openly available to the public,' according to DORA.
