Revolutionizing Institutional Hiring and Assessment Policies

At research and funding organizations, metrics are used to assess the performance of individual researchers that determine funding, hiring and promotion decisions. In many resarch insitutions journal-based metrics like the Journal Impact Factor (IF or JIF) have been used as a surrogate measure for individual researchers' performance.

The IF measures the cumulative citation rate of all articles published in a journal and was originally established to help libraries to decide which journals to add to their collections. It is not only a poor measurement for the individual impact of journal articles and researchers. As foundation for hiring policies it has pressured researchers to publish in prestigious high-impact journals like Nature, Cell or Science to advance their career thereby leading to high submission numbers for these journals and often slow and frustrating publication processes for latest research in many disciplines.

In recent years, this practice has been heavily criticized so that more and more universities, research organizations and funders are moving away from journal based metrics and follow the recommendations of The San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment to improve their assessment procedures.