Examples
Worked examples
- Is an instance
A national evaluation agency cites the Manifesto when allowing field-normalised indicators only as a complement to peer review, never a replacement for it.
- Is an instance
An institution shares the underlying bibliometric data with the researchers being evaluated so they can verify it themselves, per Principle 5.
Counter-examples
Looks similar, but isn't
- Not an instance
Comparing a humanities scholar's citation counts against a biomedical scholar's using the same threshold, ignoring Principle 6 on field variation.
- Not an instance
Publishing an institutional ranking derived from indicators whose calculation method is not documented, violating Principle 4's transparency requirement.
Editorial commentary
The Leiden Manifesto for research metrics was published in Nature in April 2015 by Diana Hicks, Paul Wouters, Ludo Waltman, Sarah de Rijcke and Ismael Rafols, following discussions at the 2014 STI (Science, Technology and Innovation Indicators) conference held in Leiden. It set out ten principles intended as a practical corrective to the increasingly careless use of bibliometric indicators in hiring, promotion, funding and institutional-ranking decisions.
The ten principles
- Quantitative evaluation should support qualitative, expert assessment.
- Measure performance against the research missions of the institution, group or researcher.
- Protect excellence in locally relevant research.
- Keep data collection and analytical processes open, transparent and simple.
- Allow those evaluated to verify data and analysis.
- Account for variation by field in publication and citation practices.
- Base assessment of individual researchers on a qualitative judgement of their portfolio.
- Avoid misplaced concreteness and false precision.
- Recognise the systemic effects of assessment and indicators.
- Scrutinise indicators regularly and update them.
How it relates to DORA, the Metric Tide, and CoARA
The Manifesto sits alongside a small cluster of foundational responsible-metrics texts published within a few years of each other. The San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) (2012) focuses specifically on eliminating journal-level metrics such as the Journal Impact Factor from researcher-level judgements. The UK’s Metric Tide report (also 2015), a HEFCE-commissioned review chaired by James Wilsdon, produced parallel recommendations for the UK sector and was itself revisited seven years later by the 2022 Harnessing the Metric Tide follow-up review. The 2022 CoARA Agreement came later still, and differs structurally from all three: it is a signable institutional commitment with a five-year reporting cycle, not a set of authorship principles. The Leiden Manifesto itself has no signatory mechanism — its influence works through citation and adoption into institutional policy, not formal membership.
References
- Hicks D, Wouters P, Waltman L, de Rijcke S, Rafols I. ‘Bibliometrics: The Leiden Manifesto for research metrics.’ Nature 520:429-431, 2015 (doi:10.1038/520429a). leidenmanifesto.org.
Also known as
Leiden Manifesto for Research Metrics · Hicks et al. 2015
Machine-readable encodings
Use in your systems
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