Please join us for a special opportunity to hear about how the quality of research publications have been evaluated. Renowned expert, Associate Professor David Moher, School of Epidemiology and Public Health, University of Ottawa, will talk about his insights on best practices on evaluating the impact of publications.
If research is going to benefit society it needs to be prioritised, designed, conducted and reported robustly; promoting the values of individual and organisational research integrity. From at least the 1960s there has been a recognition of problems throughout the research industrial complex enterprise. One recent impact of these problems has been a crisis in reproducibility. Yet researchers have seen their careers advance. At least one scholar has noted the moral and ethical perils of this situation. Promotion and tenure occur because researchers have been able to satisfy the current (albeit narrow) criteria needed to advance their careers, ostensibly publications and associated criteria, usually journal impact factors (JIFs).
Most promotion and tenure committees focus on easily collectable quantitative data – typically arbitrarily stated thresholds about the number of publications required in journals with particular JIFs. There is a growing view that current incentive and reward criteria to advance careers is of limited value, does not reflect research integrity, is not evidence-based and needs to be updated to reflect the current researcher assessment gestalt. More appropriate incentives and rewards may help improve the impact of research and researchers, including its societal utility, value, and enhance research integrity within academic organisations and beyond. How researchers are evaluated reflects what we value most – and don’t – in the research enterprise and powerfully influences researchers’ behaviour, including research integrity.
Dr David Moher is a senior scientist, Clinical Epidemiology Program, Ottawa Hospital Research Institute, where he directs the Centre for Journalology. He is also an Associate Professor, School of Epidemiology and Public Health, University of Ottawa, where he holds a University Research Chair. Dr Moher received an MSc in epidemiology and PhD in clinical epidemiology and biostatistics. Dr Moher spearheaded the development of reporting guidelines including the CONSORT and PRISMA statements; he directs the Canadian EQUATOR centre. Dr Moher led a program to develop a set of core competencies for scientific journal editors. He leads an active program investigating deceptive journals and a program to investigate alternatives for assessing scientists in academic medicine. Dr Moher has received approximately $100 million dollars in peer reviewed funding throughout his career. He has been recognised six times as one of the most highly influential biomedical researchers in the world: Clarivate Analytics in two categories: Social Science and Clinical Medicine (formally Thomson Reuters).
