What counts in research? Dysfunction in knowledge creation & moving beyond

Abstract

This chapter begins with a brief history of scholarly journals and the origins of bibliometrics and an overview of how metrics feed into university rankings. Journal impact factor (IF), a measure of average citations to articles in a particular journal, was the sole universal standard for assessing quality of journals and articles until quite recently. IF has been widely critiqued; even Clarivate Analytics, the publisher of the Journal Citation Reports / IF, cautions against use of IF for research assessment. In the past few years there have been several major calls for change in research assessment: the 2012 San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA), the 2015 Leiden Manifesto (translated into 18 languages) and the 2017 Science Europe New vision for meaningful research assessment. Meanwhile, due to rapid change in the underlying technology, practice is changing far more rapidly than most of us realize. IF has already largely been replaced by item-level citation data from Elsevier’s Scopus in university rankings. Altmetrics illustrating a wide range of uses including but moving beyond citation data, such as downloads and social media use are prominently displayed on publishers’ websites. The purpose of this chapter is to provide an overview of how these metrics work at present, to move beyond technical critique (reliability and validity of metrics) to introduce major flaws in the logic behind metrics-based assessment of research, and to call for even more radical thought and change towards a more qualitative approach to assessment. The collective agreement of the University of Ottawa is presented as one model for change.