Beyond the Impact Factor: What Responsible Research Assessment Means for You

<p>For a long time, one number did a lot of quiet work in academic careers. The Journal Impact Factor (JIF) — a journal-level average of citations — was used as a stand-in for the quality of individual papers, and even of the people who wrote them. It was convenient. It was also, as a growing movement argues, the wrong tool for the job.</p> <h2>Three landmarks worth knowing</h2> <p>The push for responsible research assessment rests on three reference points:</p> <ul> <li><strong>DORA</strong> (the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment), drafted in 2012 and released in 2013, makes one overriding recommendation: do not use journal-based metrics such as the JIF as a surrogate for the quality of an individual article or researcher, or in hiring, promotion, and funding decisions. It has since grown to tens of thousands of signatories — on the order of 26,000 across roughly 170 countries by 2024 to 2025.</li> <li>The <strong>Leiden Manifesto</strong> (Nature, 2015) sets out ten principles for using metrics well. Its first principle says it best: quantitative evaluation should support, not supplant, expert qualitative judgement.</li> <li><strong>CoARA</strong>, the Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment (2022), turns those ideas into shared commitments: base assessment primarily on qualitative evaluation with peer review at its centre, recognise the diversity of research contributions and careers, and stop the inappropriate use of journal- and publication-based metrics.</li> </ul> <p>A point that is easy to miss: none of these say metrics are useless, and none "ban" the Impact Factor. The target is its <em>misuse</em> as a proxy for individual quality — not its existence as one journal-level indicator among many.</p> <h2>What changes for you as an author</h2> <p>The practical shift is from "where did you publish?" to "what did you actually contribute?" That is good news, especially for early-career researchers and for anyone whose best work appears in a focused, specialist venue rather than a famous generalist one. Increasingly, assessment also recognises a fuller range of outputs — datasets, software, protocols, mentoring — not just the journal article.</p> <h2>What a responsible publisher does</h2> <p>DORA gives publishers concrete homework, and it shapes how we think at Xpertia:</p> <ul> <li>De-emphasise the Impact Factor as a marketing device, and present any metric in context.</li> <li>Surface article-level signals — citations in context, usage, attention, data and code reuse — rather than leaning on a single journal number.</li> <li>Support <strong>ORCID</strong> and the <strong>CRediT</strong> contributor taxonomy so individual contributions are visible and correctly credited.</li> <li>Keep references and metadata open so the scholarly record can be analysed honestly.</li> </ul> <p>This is exactly the kind of publisher we are building: one whose credibility rests on quality and transparency, not on an inflated impact claim. If your work deserves to be judged on its merits, the assessment system is finally moving your way — and we intend to move with it.</p>