Editor in chief of nature: it's time to change the rules of scientific research evaluation

Editor's note: at the end of April this year, nature signed the San Francisco Declaration on scientific research assessment, advocating that scientific research assessment should no longer rely excessively on journal based indicators In order to better express this view and respond to queries, Sir Philip Campbell, the editor in chief of nature and natural research, has written a signed article to communicate with the Chinese scientific and technological circles on this topic in good faith Philip Campbell, editor in chief of nature (source: Science Network): as editor in chief of nature, I am very concerned about the influence of scientific research papers published in magazines Every year, scientists from all over the world send us about 11000 papers After strict editing and technical review, only about 800 papers will be published In recent years, the proportion of Chinese papers is increasing, which is really gratifying But how to measure the impact of nature? How best to assess the impact of each scientist? Most importantly, will these assessment methods be abused? How can we avoid abuse? An index used to measure the scientific research influence of a single paper is the number of times that the paper has been referenced by other papers, that is, the number of citations Many scientists will be proud of the highly cited papers Some of nature's papers will be cited hundreds of times in the first two years of publication However, nature also published many papers that were cited much less frequently But we still think these papers are important - we believe in our own judgment, and we think the authors should be proud of them This is because there are other criteria for measuring the importance of a paper Some papers may not be at the top of the citations like cancer genomics, but they can also bring extraordinary insights in some fields of knowledge, such as how microbes compete to grow in the environment, or how our ancestors developed tools in ancient times We love these papers! Of course, we also like the research results published in other journals Throughout the history of science, many of the most useful highly cited papers are not published in nature or other journals that are more selective, such as science or cell If you ask scientists where their proudest research is published, they tend to answer questions about other less well-known, less cited journals Moreover, as more and more researchers focus on solving social challenges, more valuable and highly practical research is published in less traditional and less eye-catching journals, which tend to focus on the science that can be applied at any time In other words, nature and other journals that are picky in selection and have high impact factors only represent a small part of important scientific research literature But if you look at the practices of many people in academia today, you think these journals are so important In a highly competitive field, university administrators and funding institutions often indulge in these journals It seems to them that if you don't publish in these "glamorous" journals, you are a failure And, in some institutions, if you publish a paper in these journals successfully, you get a big bonus In 2013, a group of scientists and organizations declared war on this harmful way of assessing individual scientists They signed the San Francisco Declaration on research assessment (Dora or San Francisco declaration for short), emphasizing that the assessment indicators based on the citation of papers, especially the impact factors, were misused and harmful to the research community, so they promised to avoid such practices Over the years, nature and its subsidiaries have repeatedly published editorials condemning this practice Recently, as a publishing organization, we have also added methods to evaluate our own success to reflect our work performance with more information We believe that we can implement these principles in good faith, so I signed the San Francisco declaration last month on behalf of natural science journals such as nature Some managers of universities and funding institutions have to use rough citation index to judge individual researchers, which will undoubtedly lead to unfair treatment of excellent researchers I hope our actions will send a clear message to these managers They need to change the rules to assess scientists with more precise and appropriate criteria, for example, by focusing on what researchers consider to be the most meaningful research The practice of giving bonus to publish papers in "high impact" journals should stop.