Many universities around the world, including Oxford, Cambridge and Edinburgh are signatories of the Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA), sometimes called the San Francisco Declaration. The Declaration, together with lists of institutional and individual signatories, can be viewed here .

To quote the DORA website: "The Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) recognizes the need to improve the ways in which researchers and the outputs of scholarly research are evaluated." DORA offers several recommendations for those involved in research assessment. In particular it emphasises the importance of assessing research on the basis of its content, not its place of publication. To quote the DORA website again, the Declaration stresses "the need to assess research on its own merits rather than on the basis of the journal in which the research is published". Many observers have noted that Economics Departments often ignore this advice. For example Oswald (2006) remarks:

In universities all over the world, hiring and promotion committees regularly hear

the argument: ‘this is important work because it is about to appear in prestigious

journal X’. Moreover those who allocate levels of research funding, such as in

the multi-billion pound Research Assessment Exercise (now the REF) in UK universities, often

come under pressure to assess research quality in a mechanical way by using

journal prestige ratings. The results in this paper suggest that such tendencies are

dangerous.

Oswald, A.J. (2006) An examination of the reliability of prestigious scholarly journals:

evidence and implications for decision-makers. Economics Department Discussion

Paper, University of Warwick (remarks in brackets added)

Economists need to change the way they value research. Please read and sign the Declaration on Research Assessment.