Appropriate Use of Bibliometric Indicators for the Assessment of Journals, Research Proposals, and Individuals

Adopted by the IEEE Board of Directors, 9 September 2013: The IEEE, in its leading position as the world´s largest professional association dedicated to advancing technological innovation and in its desire to fulfill its primary mission of fostering technological excellence for the benefit of humanity, recognizes the above concerns about the inappropriate application of bibliometrics to the evaluation of both scientists and research proposals. More specifically, the IEEE endorses the following tenets in conducting proper assessment in the areas of Engineering, Computer Science, and Information Technology: 1. The use of multiple complementary bibliometric indicators is fundamentally important to offer an appropriate, comprehensive, and balanced view of each journal in the space of scholarly publications. The IEEE has recently adopted the Eigenfactor and the Article Influence5 in addition to the IF for the internal and competitive assessment of its publications24 and welcomes the adoption of other appropriate complementary measures at the article level, such as those recently introduced in the framework of the so-called altmetrics,25 once they have been appropriately validated and recognized by the scientific community. 2. Any journal-based metric is not designed to capture qualities of individual papers and must therefore not be used as a proxy for single-article quality or to evaluate individual scientists. All journals´ bibliometric indices are obtained by averaging over many papers, and it cannot be assumed that every single article published in a high-impact journal, as determined by any particular journal metric, will be highly cited. 3. While bibliometrics may be employed as a source of additional information for quality assessment within a specific area of research, the primary manner for assessment of either the scientific quality of a research project or of an individual scientist should be peer review, which will consider the scientific content as the mo- t important aspect, and also the publication expectations in the area, and the size and practice of the research community.