DORA: The San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment

Abstract

year, an event marked at the time by Bruce Alberts, then the Editor-in-Chief of Science, in an editorial 1 entitled 'Impact factor distortions'. DORA aims to contextualise journal impact factors, indicating that they were originally and specifically developed to allow journals to understand their own impacts in the world of science and scholarship, and not as means for assessing the performance of individual researchers or institutions of higher learning. To achieve this aim, DORA proposes 18 recommendations to funders, institutions, researchers, publishers and the suppliers of metrics. The recommendations include phasing out metrics at the level of journals and replacing them with article-level measures, being transparent and straightforward about assessment, and judging articles on the basis of real content.