EXPECTATIONS for RPOs

The Journal Impact Factor (JIF) is frequently used as a primary quality measure of the scientific output of researchers and institutions. It was not originally intended to be a measure of the scientific quality of research, but as a tool to help librarians identify which journals they should purchase. It is therefore critical to understand that the JIF has limitations on its use as a tool for research assessment. There are a number of well-documented deficiencies in using it in this way, such as: a) citation distributions within journals are highly skewed; b) they are highly affected by the nature of the disciplinary field; c) JIFs can be manipulated by editorial policy; and d) data used to calculate the JIFs are neither transparent nor openly available to the public. In this resource, DORA provides several recommendations for improving the way in which the quality of research output is evaluated. The recommendations listed here focus primarily on practices relating to research articles published in peer-reviewed journals but can be extended by recognizing additional products as important research outputs, for example datasets and pre-registrations. These recommendations are aimed at funding agencies, academic institutions, journals, organizations that supply metrics, and individual researchers.