A broader view of research contributions: Necessary adjustments to DORA for hiring and promotion in psychology.

Abstract

Recently Schönbrodt et al. (2022) released recommendations for improving how psychologists could be evaluated for recruitment, retention, and promotion. Specifically, they provided four principles of responsible research assessment in response to current methods that rely heavily on bibliometric indices of journal quality and research impact. They build their case for these principles on the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) perspective that decries reliance on invalid quantitative metrics of research quality and productivity in hiring and promotion. The paper makes clear the tension panels have to address in evaluating applications—too little time to do an in-depth evaluation of an individual’s career and contribution, so reliance on easy to understand, but perhaps invalid, metrics. This dilemma requires an alternative mechanism rather than simply a rejection of metrics. To that end, the authors are to be congratulated for operationalising what those alternatives might look like. Nonetheless, the details embedded in the principles seem overly narrow and restrictive.