Making an impact instead of 'publish or perish'

Abstract

The time has come to thoroughly reconsider the current dominance of scientific impact scores as a measure of the performance of health researchers. We advocate a more balanced approach which values societal impact as well. Some valuable efforts are being made to measure societal impact and it is now a matter of courage to give both of these impact scores equal weight. Since science has always been considered a public good, academics have felt it their responsibility to ensure scientific quality. In 1731, the Royal Society of Edinburgh described how medical essays were judged by editors having comparable knowledge of the topic, to ensure objectivity. This practice gradually developed into the peer-review system for scientific reports, to ensure high quality in science. After the Second World War, this system gained momentum, and the process was institutionalized. Nowadays, the Web of Science (WoS) covers more than 12 000 journals on all subject areas, and journals that can be tracked for ≥3 years are given an impact factor. In addition to the annual Journal Impact Factors, the cumulative impact of an individual researcher’s scientific output can be quantified by bibliometric methods. Similarly, metrics for the academic ranking of world universities include the numbers of highly cited authors and numbers of articles in Nature and Science , as well as the mean citation score and the number of awards per university. These are used to measure the performance of universities, while …

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