Examples
Worked examples
- Is an instance
A university revises its tenure policy to remove JIF thresholds and cites DORA in the rationale.
- Is an instance
A funder asks reviewers to evaluate publications on content rather than venue, in line with DORA principles.
Counter-examples
Looks similar, but isn't
- Not an instance
Promotion committee ranks candidates strictly by sum of impact factors of journals in which they published.
- Not an instance
Funder rejects an application solely because none of the cited works appeared in a Q1 journal.
Editorial commentary
The San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) was drafted during the Annual Meeting of the American Society for Cell Biology (ASCB) in San Francisco on December 16, 2012, and has since become one of the most widely signed reform statements in research assessment. DORA sets out a general recommendation applicable to every stakeholder group, followed by specific recommendations addressed to five distinct audiences: funding agencies, research institutions, publishers, organizations that supply metrics, and individual researchers.
What DORA actually says
DORA’s general recommendation is the one most often quoted: eliminate the use of journal-based metrics, such as the Journal Impact Factor, as a surrogate measure of the quality of individual research articles, of an individual scientist’s contributions, or in hiring, promotion, and funding decisions. Beyond that general recommendation, DORA sets out 17 further, group-specific recommendations — 2 addressed to funding agencies, 2 to institutions, 5 to publishers, 4 to organizations that supply metrics, and 4 to researchers — for 18 recommendations in total. Publishers and metrics suppliers carry the largest share because DORA treats the supply side of journal-level metrics, not only their use, as part of the problem.
Its position on the Journal Impact Factor
DORA’s critique of the Journal Impact Factor (JIF) is specific and documented, not a blanket objection to quantitative evaluation. The declaration states the JIF was originally created as a tool to help librarians make purchasing decisions, not as a measure of the scientific quality of an article’s research, and identifies four documented deficiencies: citation distributions within journals are highly skewed; JIF properties vary substantially by field, making cross-field comparison unsound; JIF can be manipulated (or gamed) by editorial policy; and the data underlying JIF calculations are not transparently available for independent scrutiny. DORA’s remedy is not to abolish citation-based indicators outright but to stop using a journal-level average as a stand-in for the quality of an individual article or person.
What DORA is not
DORA is a declaration, not a certification body, an accreditation scheme, or a data standard. It has no enforcement mechanism and does not audit signatories — see DORA signatory for what signing actually commits an organization to do in practice, as distinct from the text of the declaration itself. DORA is also frequently discussed alongside the Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment (CoARA), a later and structurally different initiative built around a signed, more detailed commitment agreement rather than a short declaration; see DORA vs. CoARA for how the two differ in scope and mechanism, and DORA, CoARA, and the Hong Kong Principles for how the three sit together in the responsible-assessment lineage.
References
- San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment, sfdora.org/read/ (accessed 2026-08-22).
Also known as
DORA · San Francisco Declaration · SF DORA
Machine-readable encodings
Use in your systems
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