San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment

Abstract

Introduction and objective: There is a pressing need to improve the ways in which the output of scientific research is evaluated by funding agencies, academic institutions, and other parties. To address this issue, a group of editors and publishers of scholarly journals met during the Annual Meeting of The American Society for Cell Biology (ASCB) in San Francisco, CA, on December 16, 2012. Method: The group developed a set of recommendations, referred to as the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment. Results and Discussion: The Journal Impact Factor is frequently used as the primary parameter with which to compare the scientific output of individuals and institutions. The Journal Impact Factor has a number of well-documented deficiencies as a tool for research assessment: citation distributions within journals are highly skewed; the properties of the Journal Impact Factor are field-specific: it is a composite of multiple, highly diverse article types, including primary research papers and reviews; Journal Impact Factors can be manipulated by editorial policy and data used to calculate the Journal Impact Factors are neither transparent nor openly available to the public. Our recommendations focus primarily on practices relating to research articles published in peer-reviewed journals but can and should be extended by recognizing additional products, such as datasets, as important research outputs. These recommendations are aimed at funding agencies, academic institutions, journals, organizations that supply metrics, and individual researchers. Conclusions: A number of themes run through these recommendations: the need to eliminate the use of journal-based metrics, such as Journal Impact Factors, in funding, appointment, and promotion considerations; the need to assess research on its own merits rather than on the basis of the journal in which the research is published; and the need to capitalize on the opportunities provided by online publication (such as relaxing unnecessary limits on the number of words, figures, and references in articles, and exploring new indicators of significance and impact).