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In August 1908, a white mob attacked Springfield, Illinois’s Black community, destroying homes and businesses and lynching two Black men. National outrage over the violence helped spur the movement that created the NAACP the following year.
MORE →Reflects the personal views, recollections, and perspective of the author, Mike Davis.
This is a personal recollection on the Move fire on May 13, 1985
| Authors | Diana Hicks, Paul Wouters, Ludo Waltman, Sarah de Rijcke, Ismael Rafols |
|---|---|
| Publisher | Nature |
| Publication date | 22 April 2015 |
| Website | leidenmanifesto.org |
The Leiden Manifesto for Research Metrics (also known as the Leiden Manifesto) is a 22 April 2015 published comment in Nature that includes a list of "ten principles to guide research evaluation".[1] It was formulated by public policy professor Diana Hicks, scientometrics professor Paul Wouters, and their colleagues at the 19th International Conference on Science and Technology Indicators, held between 3–5 September 2014 in Leiden, The Netherlands.[2]
The Leiden Manifesto was proposed as a guide to combat misuse of bibliometrics when evaluating scientific research literature. Examples of commonly used bibliometrics for science, or scientometrics, are the h-index, impact factor, other indicators such as Altmetrics. According to the Manifesto's authors, these metrics often pervasively misguide evaluations of scientific material.[3]
Motivations for codification of the Leiden Manifesto arose from a growing worry that "impact-factor obsession"[1] was leading to inadequate judgement of scientific material that should be worthy of fair evaluation. Lead author Diana Hicks hoped that publishing the list in Nature would spread its ideas, already commonplace in the scientometrics sphere, to the broader scientific community.[4]
The scientific community has long been interested in reforming assessment of the impact of scientific and academic research. The 2013 San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA), which has been signed by over 27,000 individuals as of March 2026, was a major influence on the Leiden Manifesto. The Declaration denounced common practices in research assessment, such as using journal impact factor to assess the contributions of individual researchers.[5]
One of the main concerns about overuse of citation-based performance indicators came from the observation that smaller research organizations and institutions may be negatively affected by their metric indices. In one public debate at the Centre for Science and Technology Studies at Leiden University, it was acknowledged that indicators which measure citations may give "more weight to publications from fields with a high expected number of citations than to publications from fields with a low expected number of citations".[6]
Although the main focus of the Leiden Manifesto is the use of scientometrics for research evaluation, the authors also consider how overuse of metrics can adversely affect the wider scholarly community, such as the position of universities in global rankings.[7][8] According to Hicks et al., scientific metrics such as citation rate are used far too much for ranking the quality of universities (and thus the quality of their research output).
The background of the Leiden Manifesto describes why misusing metrics is becoming a larger problem in the scientific community. The journal impact factor, originally created by Eugene Garfield as a method for librarians to collect data to facilitate selecting journals to purchase, is now mainly used as a method of judging journal quality.[9] This is seen by the authors as an abuse of data in order to examine research too hastily. For example, an impact factor, while a good metric to measure the size and experience of a journal, may or may not be sufficient to accurately describe the quality of its papers, and even less so for a single paper.
The Leiden Manifesto consists of ten principles which aim to reform how research quality is assessed by academic publishers and institutions. It emphasizes detailed and close evaluation of research, rather than relying exclusively on quantitative data. It also aims to remove possible perverse incentives for using scientometrics, such as judgement of academic capability and university quality.[10]
The ten principles of the Leiden Manifesto are as follows:[1]
In 2016, the European Association for the Study of Science and Technology (EASST) gave its John Ziman Award to the Leiden Manifesto for its effort to widen scientometrics knowledge to the scientific community as a whole. EASST president Fred Steward stated that it "emphasizes situatedness, in terms of different cognitive domains and research missions as well as the wider socioeconomic, national and regional context".[13]
LIBER, a collaboration of European research libraries, issued a substantial review of the Leiden Manifesto in 2017, concluding that it was a "solid foundation" on which academic libraries could base their assessment of metrics.[14]
Elsevier announced on 14 July 2020 that it would use the Leiden Manifesto to guide its development of improved research evaluation. Elsevier stated that the principles of the manifesto were already close in nature to their 2019 CiteScore metrics, which was in summary "improved calculation methodology" for "a more robust, fair and faster indicator of research impact".[15]
Loughborough University's LIS-Bibliometrics committee chose to base their own principles on the Leiden Manifesto, instead of the DORA, because the manifesto takes a "broader approach to the responsible use of all bibliometrics across a range of disciplines and settings", according to their policy manager Elizabeth Gadd.[16] Stephen Curry, chair of the DORA steering committee, commented on this statement by emphasizing that DORA was aiming to extend its "disciplinary and geographical reach".[17]
David Moher and his co-authors referenced the Leiden Manifesto in a perspective for Issues in Science and Technology, writing that academic institutions were not asking the "right questions" (concerning research planning, timeframe, reproducibility, and results) when assessing scientists. They criticize what they see as an obsession with journal impact factors and the "gaming" of scientometrics, advocating that institutions use DORA and the Leiden Manifesto principles instead when assessing individual scientists and research.[18]
In a letter in Science and Engineering Ethics, T. Kanchan and Kewal Krishan called the Leiden Manifesto "one of the best criteria" for assessing scientific research, especially considering the "rat race" for publications in the scholarly community. They also argue that use of the Manifesto will lead to "progress of science and society at large".[19]
Source: Wikipedia. Article content is retrieved live through the MediaWiki API.
The Leiden Manifesto for Research Metrics (also known as the Leiden Manifesto) is a 22 April 2015 published comment in Nature that includes a list of "ten principles to guide research evaluation". It was formulated by public policy professor Diana Hicks, scientometrics professor Paul Wouters, and their colleagues at the 19th International Conference on Science and Technology Indicators, held between 3–5 September 2014 in Leiden, The Netherlands. The Leiden Manifesto was proposed as a guide to combat misuse of bibliometrics when evaluating scientific research literature. Examples of commonly used bibliometrics for science, or scientometrics, are the h-index, impact factor, other indicators such as Altmetrics. According to the Manifesto's authors, these metrics often pervasively misguide evaluations of scientific material.
Bibliometrics is the application of statistical methods to the study of bibliographic data, especially in scientific and library and information science contexts. It is closely associated with scientometrics (the analysis of scientific metrics and indicators), to the point that both fields largely overlap. Bibliometrics studies first appeared in the late 19th century. They have known a significant development after the Second World War in a context of "periodical crisis" and new technical opportunities offered by computing tools. In the early 1960s, the Science Citation Index of Eugene Garfield and the citation network analysis of Derek John de Solla Price laid the fundamental basis of a structured research program on bibliometrics. Citation analysis is a commonly used bibliometric method based on constructing the citation graph, a network or graph representation of the citations shared by documents. Many research fields use bibliometric methods to explore the impact of their field, the impact of a set of researchers, the impact of a particular paper, or to identify particularly impactful papers within a specific field of research. Bibliometrics tools have been commonly integrated in descriptive linguistics, the development of thesauri, and evaluation of reader usage. Beyond specialized scientific use, popular web search engines, such as the pagerank algorithm implemented by Google have been largely shaped by bibliometrics methods and concepts. The emergence of the Web and the open science movement has gradually transformed the definition and the purpose of "bibliometrics." In the 2010s historical proprietary infrastructures for citation data such as the Web of Science or Scopus have been challenged by new initiatives in favor of open citation data. The Leiden Manifesto for Research Metrics (2015) opened a wide debate on the use and transparency of metrics.
In scholarly and scientific publishing, altmetrics (stands for "alternative metrics") are non-traditional bibliometrics proposed as an alternative or complement to more traditional citation impact metrics, such as impact factor and h-index. The term altmetrics was proposed in 2010, as a generalization of article level metrics, and has its roots in the #altmetrics hashtag. Although altmetrics are often thought of as metrics about articles, they can be applied to people, journals, books, data sets, presentations, videos, source code repositories, web pages, etc. Altmetrics use public APIs across platforms to gather data with open scripts and algorithms. Altmetrics did not originally cover citation counts, but calculate scholar impact based on diverse online research output, such as social media, online news media, online reference managers and so on. It demonstrates both the impact and the detailed composition of the impact. Altmetrics could be applied to research filter, promotion and tenure dossiers, grant applications and for ranking newly-published articles in academic search engines. Over time, the diversity of sources mentioning, citing, or archiving articles has gone down. This happened because services ceased to exist, like Connotea, or because changes in API availability. For example, PlumX removed Twitter metrics in August 2023.
Languages of science are vehicular languages used by one or several scientific communities for international communication. According to the science historian Michael Gordin, scientific languages are "either specific forms of a given language that are used in conducting science, or they are the set of distinct languages in which science is done." These two meanings are different, since the first describes a distinct prose in a given language (i.e., scientific writing), while the second describes which languages are used in mainstream science. Until the 19th century, classical languages—such as Latin, Classical Arabic, Sanskrit, Classical Malay and Classical Chinese—were commonly used across Afro-Eurasia for international scientific communication. A combination of structural factors, the emergence of nation-states in Europe, the Industrial Revolution, and the expansion of colonization entailed the global use of three European national languages: French, German, and English. Yet new languages of science, such as Russian and Italian, had started to emerge by the end of the 19th century—to the point that international scientific organizations began promoting the use of constructed languages such as Esperanto as a non-national global standard. After the First World War, English gradually outpaced French and German; it became the leading language of science, but not the only international standard. Research in the Soviet Union (USSR) rapidly expanded in the years after the Second World War, and access to Russian journals became a major policy issue in the United States, prompting the early development of machine translation. In the last decades of the 20th century, an increasing number of scientific publications were written primarily in English, in part due to the preeminence of English-speaking scientific infrastructure, indexes, and metrics such as the Science Citation Index. Local languages remain largely relevant for science in major countries and world regions such as China, Latin America, and Indonesia. Disciplines and fields of study with a significant degree of public engagement—such as social sciences, environmental studies, and medicine—have also maintained the relevance of local languages. The development of open science has revived the debate over linguistic diversity in science, as social and local impact has become an important objective of open science infrastructure and platforms. In 2019, 120 international research organizations cosigned the Helsinki Initiative on Multilingualism in Scholarly Communication; they also called for supporting multilingualism and the development of an "infrastructure of scholarly communication in national languages". In 2021, UNESCO's Recommendation for Open Science included "linguistic diversity" as one of the core features of open science, since this diversity aims to "make multilingual scientific knowledge openly available, accessible and reusable for everyone." In 2022, the Council of the European Union officially supported "initiatives to promote multilingualism" in science, such as the Helsinki Initiative.
Before the 1921 destruction of Tulsa’s Greenwood District, Black residents had created a remarkable center of business and community life. The district included stores, professional offices, entertainment venues and homes owned by Black citizens. Understanding Greenwood means learning what was built—not only what was burned.
MORE →Shirley Chisholm, elected in 1968.