An unlikely group of agitators — scientists, journal editors, scholarly societies, and policy makers — this week threw down a gauntlet on the use of journal impact factors as a surrogate for scientific quality. The San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment, or DORA, declares that the way in which impact factors are currently being used, as a shorthand to evaluate scientists’ work, is distorting and, ultimately, undermining how research is conducted, reported, and funded.
Read and sign the declaration here.