May 16, 2023
The American Physical Society (APS), publisher of the Physical Review journals, is joining more than 20,000 individuals and organizations across 160 countries in a commitment to improve how researchers and their contributions to the scientific record are evaluated. APS is proud to mark the 10th anniversary of the Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) by officially signing on to the international initiative. Read the declaration.
Developed during the Annual Meeting of the American Society for Cell Biology in San Francisco, DORA promotes more accurate and equitable approaches to research assessment by funding agencies, institutions, and publishers. A key tenet of the declaration is a reduced emphasis on Journal Impact Factors as a measure of scientific merit and research impact. Accordingly, APS journals have long presented a variety of journal-level metrics, including the Eigenfactor®, h5-index, and Immediacy Index, to provide authors and readers with a more complete picture of a journal’s performance. Consistent with DORA’s recommendations for publishers, Physical Review journals provide Altmetrics data for individual articles and do not impose word limits on References and Acknowledgements. The Physical Review journals offer a variety of article lengths and formats, such as Perspectives, Tutorials, Review Articles, Regular Articles, and Letters that enable authors to document and disseminate the full breadth and depth of their work.
APS recognizes that journal articles are one of many types of research outputs. The Society fully supports the principles outlined by DORA and their application to all aspects of the scientific enterprise. Evaluating research on its own merits, rather than the venue in which it appears, is essential to APS’s mission to advance and diffuse the knowledge of physics for the benefit of humanity.