By Kate Yandell
A declaration asking that the research community pay less attention to impact factor now has 484 signatures, 87 of them from institutions and 397 from individual members of the scientific community. Impact factor is calculated by Thomson Reuters based on academic journals’ citation rates, as a measure of prestige. The document, called the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA), asks that scientists, funding bodies, and others stop using the number as “a surrogate measure of the quality of individual research articles.”
