Moving Beyond Metrics: A Primer for Hiring and Promoting a Diverse Workforce in Entomology and Other Natural Sciences

Abstract

The lack of a representative scientific workforce is a challenge being addressed by federal agencies, funding bodies, and research institutes. As organizational units emphasize the work of training, recruiting, retaining, and promoting an inclusive scientific body, issues around bias and metrics appear frequently in the literature. The goal of this manuscript is to introduce some of the most commonly misunderstood areas of bias, and ways to adjust hiring and promotion practices; and to focus on innovative ways to quantify scientific outputs through metrics other than journal impact factors and paper citation numbers. These alternative metrics, or altmetrics, are increasingly reliable predictors of impact for a scientific community that is asked to engage more frequently and more effectively with the public. Additionally, we address discipline-specific concerns around metrics used for hiring and promotion in biosecurity and biosafety, taxonomy, and researchers in government and regulatory roles. We conclude that in the future, societal and scholarly impact will be more closely tied. This is a critical time to ensure scientists are adequately trained and recognized for their contributions as public intellectuals, and supported in this important work.