The 2013 San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) formally names journal-based metrics as the problem and tells institutions not to use them to judge individual research

The San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA), which originated at a December 2012 meeting of the American Society for Cell Biology and was published in May 2013, is the scientific community's formal institutional response to the gaming of citation-count metrics. Its first general recommendation states: "Do not use journal-based metrics, such as Journal Impact Factors, as a surrogate measure of the quality of individual research articles, to assess an individual scientist's contributions, or in hiring, promotion, or funding decisions." The declaration accumulated thousands of individual and organizational signatories within weeks of publication.

DORA is notable for locating the fault in the metric's misuse, not merely in bad actors: it treats the Journal Impact Factor as structurally unfit for evaluating individuals, regardless of whether any particular editor is coercing citations. It is the institutional antibody to the practice documented in claim-wilhite-fong-2012-coercive-self-citation-common — the disease (coercive citation) and the cure (DORA) trace to the same root cause: turning a descriptive index into an evaluative target, a clean instance of Goodhart's Law. As a self-correcting move by a scientific field, it is a structural cousin to the correction dynamics tracked in cases like claim-yellow-rain-bee-feces-refutation-never-formally-retracted, though DORA attacks the evaluation apparatus rather than any single disputed finding.