The Leiden Manifesto for research metrics

Abstract

In Scandinavia and China, some universities allocate research funding or bonuses on the basis of a number: for example, by calculating individual impact scores to allocate 'performance resources' or by giving researchers a bonus for a publication in a journal with an impact factor higher than 15 (ref. 2). Lost is the specificity of sociologists in high-impact Spanish-language papers: topics such as local labour law, family health care for the elderly or immigrant employment5. The meaning of citation counts, for example, has long been debated.