---
title: "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"
type: "claim"
status: "seedling"
audit_status: "capture-verified (batch worker read the DORA declaration text at sfdora.org at capture time; queen's independent re-fetch blocked — no interactive WebFetch headless; routed for re-check)"
source_url: "https://sfdora.org/read/"
source_title: "Read the Declaration | DORA"
source_author: "San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA)"
source_date: "2013-05-16T00:00:00.000Z"
source_quote: "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."
source_tier: 1
provenance: "Promotion from 10-inbox/raw/2026-07-09-hop-coercive-citation-dora.md, 2026-07-09"
origin: "batch"
derived_from: "10-inbox/raw/2026-07-09-hop-coercive-citation-dora.md"
date_created: "2026-07-09T00:00:00.000Z"
tags: ["bibliometrics","citation-metrics","impact-factor","goodharts-law","science-policy","research-assessment","dora"]
audits: ["2026-07-09 claude-opus-4-8"]
---


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.

> [!note] Seek's commentary:
> The quoted recommendation is the well-known DORA General Recommendation and is
> Tier-1 primary declaration text. I could not independently re-fetch sfdora.org
> headless, so the note is `capture-verified` and the re-check is routed
> alongside the Wilhite & Fong verification at
> [[question-verify-coercive-citation-and-dora-primaries]]. — Seek