biology

San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment

San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment is a biology topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment rather than just read about it. In short: The San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) is a statement that denounces the practice of correlating the journal impact factor to the merits of a specific scientist's contributions. Also according to this statement, this practice creates biases and inaccuracies when appraising scientific research.

Key takeaways

San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment belongs to biology; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

The San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) is a statement that denounces the practice of correlating the journal impact factor to the merits of a specific scientist's contributions. Also according to this statement, this practice creates biases and inaccuracies when appraising scientific research. It also states that the impact factor is not to be used as a substitute "measure of the quality of individual research articles, or in hiring, promotion, or funding decisions". The declaration originated from the December 2012 meeting of the American Society for Cell Biology, and was published on May 13, 2013, signed by more than 150 scientists and 75 scientific organizations. The American Society for Cell Biology states that, as of 30 May 2013, there were more than 6,000 individual signatories to the declaration and that the number of scientific organizations "signing on has gone from 78 to 231" within two weeks. As of 14 December 2017, the number of individual signatories has risen to over 12,800 and the number of scientific organizations to 872. Some organization signatories in 2017 include the British Library, Nature Research, BioMed Central, Springer Open and Cancer Research UK. DORA is also an organization whose mission is to "advance practical and robust approaches to research assessment globally and across all scholarly disciplines".

Motivation

On 16 December 2012, a group of editors and publishers of academic journals gathered at the Annual Meeting of The American Society for Cell Biology in San Francisco to discuss current issues related to how the quality of research output is evaluated and how the primary scientific literature is cited. The motivation behind the meeting was the consensus that impact factors for many cell biology journals do not accurately reflect the value to the cell biology community of the work published in these journals. The group therefore wanted to discuss how to better align measures of journal and article impact with journal quality. All the above considerations also extend to other fields and the organizers consider DORA "a worldwide initiative covering all scholarly disciplines". In fact, the declaration has been signed by scientific associations with general scope (such as the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic), by more specialized associations working in fields quite removed from biology (such as the European Mathematical Society, Geological Society of London, and Linguistic Society of America), as well as by some universities and other general institutions (such as the Higher Education Funding Council for England). The outcome of the meeting and further discussions was a set of recommendations that is referred to as the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment, published in May 2013.

Signatories As of 3 May 2021, 2203 organisations and 17,354 individuals had signed the declaration, including universities, research institutes, learned societies and funding bodies from around the world. On 20 May 2020 Springer Nature became the largest research publisher to sign the declaration.

Implementation In November 2019, Dutch universities and research funders announced the introduction of a new system of research recognition and reward, based on the DORA principles. In November 2019, in the context of its roadmap for open science, the French national research agency CNRS announced the introduction of a system of individual assessment of researchers based on the DORA principles. In March 2021, in the context of a reorganization, the university of Liverpool used the field-weighted citation-impact metric for determining which faculty jobs were at risk of being cut. This happened although that university was a signatory of DORA. This prompted the DORA organization, as well as the authors of the Leiden Manifesto, to contact the university for raising concerns. In June 2021, Utrecht University announced that it would no longer use the impact factor in hiring and promotion decisions. This decision was partly inspired by the DORA declaration, which the university had signed in 2019.

Activities of the organization

DORA is working on Project TARA (Tools to Advance Research Assessment), which aims to "facilitate the development of new policies and practices for academic career assessment". As part of Project TARA, DORA has launched the database Reformscape, which collates policies on research assessment from research institutions.

See also Goodhart's law Journal Citation Reports Scientific journal

References

Further reading John Bohannon (June 2016). "Hate Journal Impact Factors? New study gives you one more reason". Science Magazine. Simons, K. (2008). "The Misused Impact Factor". Science. 322 (5899): 165. doi:10.1126/science.1165316. PMID 18845714. Archambault, Éric; Vincent Larivière (2009). "History of the journal impact factor: Contingencies and consequences" (PDF). Scientometrics. 79 (3): 635–649. doi:10.1007/s11192-007-2036-x. S2CID 378976. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2013-05-31. Andrew Plume (3 June 2013). San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) – Elsevier’s view. A commentary on DORA by the Associate Director – Scientometrics & Market Analysis of major scientific journal publisher Elsevier. Curry, Stephen (2016). "Who's afraid of DORA?". Research Fortnight. Retrieved 14 December 2017. IEEE (2018). "The Culture of 'Publish or Perish' Is Hurting Research". The IEEE Institute. Archived from the original on March 15, 2018.

External links Official website

Illustrations

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In biology, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment

In research: San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment appears in biology research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics 2012 in California, 2012 in science, Academic publishing, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment in simple terms?

Why does San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment matter?

Because it connects several biology ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment.