A ‘perverse incentive’ from bibliometrics: could National Research Assessment Exercises (NRAEs) restrict literature availability for nature conservation?

Abstract

National Research Assessment Exercises (NRAEs) aim to improve returns from public funding of research. Critics argue that they undervalue publications influencing practice, not citations, implying that journals valued least by NRAEs are disproportionately useful to practitioners. Conservation biology can evaluate this criticism because it uses species recovery plans, which are practitioner-authored blueprints for recovering threatened species. The literature cited in them indicates what is important to practitioners’ work. We profiled journals cited in 50 randomly selected recovery plans from each of the USA, Australia and New Zealand, using ranking criteria from the Australian Research Council and the SCImago Institute. Citations showed no consistent pattern. Sometimes higher ranked publications were represented more frequently, sometimes lower ranked publications. Recovery plans in all countries also contained 37 % or more citations to ‘grey literature’, discounted in NRAEs. If NRAEs discourage peer-reviewed publication at any level they could exacerbate the trend not to publish information useful for applied conservation, possibly harming conservation efforts. While indicating the potential for an impact does not establish that it occurs, it does suggest preventive steps. NRAEs considering the proportion of papers in top journals may discourage publication in lower-ranked journals, because one way to increase the proportion of outputs in top journals is by not publishing in lower ones. Instead, perhaps only a user-nominated subset of publications could be evaluated, a department’s or an individual’s share of the top publications in a field could be noted, or innovative new multivariate assessments of research productivity applied, including social impact.