Abstract
Assessment of researchers is necessary for decisions of hiring, promotion, and tenure. A burgeoning number of scientific leaders believe the current system of faculty incentives and rewards is misaligned with the needs of society and disconnected from the evidence about the causes of the reproducibility crisis and suboptimal quality of the scientific publication record. To address this issue, particularly for the clinical and life sciences, we convened a 22-member expert panel workshop in Washington, DC, in January 2017. Twenty-two academic leaders, funders, and scientists participated in the meeting. As background for the meeting, we completed a selective literature review of 22 key documents critiquing the current incentive system. From each document, we extracted how the authors perceived the problems of assessing science and scientists, the unintended consequences of maintaining the status quo for assessing scientists, and details of their proposed solutions. The resulting table was used as a seed for participant discussion. This resulted in six principles for assessing scientists and associated research and policy implications. We hope the content of this paper will serve as a basis for establishing best practices and redesigning the current approaches to assessing scientists by the many players involved in that process.
Highlights
Assessing researchers is a focal point of decisions about their hiring, promotion, and tenure
Pre-existing commentaries and proposals to assess scientists were identified with snowball techniques [16] to examine the literature to ascertain what other groups are writing, proposing, or implementing in terms of how to assess scientists
Broad criteria were used for article inclusion
Summary
Assessing researchers is a focal point of decisions about their hiring, promotion, and tenure. Many institutions still use it to assess faculty through the quality of the literature they publish in, or even to determine monetary rewards [2]. In applied and life sciences, the reproducibility of findings by others or the productivity of a research finding is rarely systematically evaluated, in spite of documented problems with the published scientific record [11] and reproducibility across all scientific domains [12,13]. This is compounded by incomplete reporting and suboptimal transparency [14]. We set out to ascertain what has been proposed to improve the evaluation of ‘life and clinical’ research scientists, how a broad spectrum of stakeholders view the strengths and weaknesses of these proposals, and what new ways of assessing scientists should be considered
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