The San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) is a statement that denounces the practice of correlating the journal impact factor to the merits of a specific scientist's contributions.

It also states that the impact factor is not to be used as a substitute "measure of the quality of individual research articles, or in hiring, promotion, or funding decisions".

[1][2] The American Society for Cell Biology states that, as of 30 May 2013[update], there were more than 6,000 individual signatories to the declaration and that the number of scientific organizations "signing on has gone from 78 to 231" within two weeks.

[6] On 16 December 2012, a group of editors and publishers of academic journals gathered at the Annual Meeting of The American Society for Cell Biology in San Francisco to discuss current issues related to how the quality of research output is evaluated and how the primary scientific literature is cited.

[11] In March 2021, in the context of a reorganization, the university of Liverpool used the field-weighted citation-impact metric for determining which faculty jobs were at risk of being cut.