[3] Motivations for codification of the Leiden Manifesto arose from a growing worry that "impact-factor obsession"[1] was leading to inadequate judgement of scientific material that should be worthy of fair evaluation.
The lead author of the LM, Diana Hicks, hoped that publishing in Nature would expand the ideas already commonplace in the scientometrics sphere to the broader scientific community.
[6] Although the main focus of the LM is based on the use of scientometrics for research evaluation, in its background, Hicks et al. also explain why overuse of metrics can adversely affect the wider scholarly community, such as the position of universities in global rankings.
Consisting of ten concise principles, along with a description for each, the Leiden Manifesto aims to reconstruct the way that research evaluations by academic publishers and scientific institutions are done.
EASST president Fred Steward stated that the LM "emphasizes situatedness, in terms of different cognitive domains and research missions as well as the wider socioeconomic, national and regional context".
Elsevier stated that the principles of the manifesto were already close in nature to their 2019 CiteScore metrics, which was in summary "improved calculation methodology" for "a more robust, fair and faster indicator of research impact".
David Moher et al. referenced the LM in a perspective for Issues in Science and Technology that the "right questions"(i.e. research planning, timeframe, reproducibility, and results) for assessing scientists were not being asked by academic institutions.
T. Kanchan and K. Krishan describe by a letter in Science and Engineering Ethics why the LM is "one of the best criteria" for assessing scientific research, especially considering the "rat race" for publications in the scholarly community.