DORA, the Narrative CV, and Altmetrics: How to Evaluate Researchers Without the Impact Factor

The Journal Impact Factor was invented in 1955 by Eugene Garfield as a tool to help librarians decide which journals to purchase for their collections. It was a bibliometric instrument designed to evaluate journals, not researchers. For reasons that have more to do with institutional convenience than scientific validity, it became the primary mechanism by which the research community evaluates individual scientists — determining who gets hired, who gets promoted, who receives grants, and whose work is considered significant.

This is one of the most consequential category errors in the history of science administration. Measuring a researcher by the average citation rate of the journal they publish in is roughly equivalent to evaluating a chef by the average quality of the restaurants in the city where they work. The correlation with actual quality is non-zero but weak, and the systematic biases introduced — against researchers in smaller countries, in less fashionable fields, in early career stages, and in institutions without the networks to place work in top-tier venues — are large, well-documented, and increasingly intolerable to the funding bodies, universities, and learned societies that have committed to changing them.

This article is about what is replacing the impact factor in research evaluation, how far that transition has actually progressed by 2026, and what both researchers and the institutions that evaluate them need to understand to navigate the current — genuinely transitional — moment.

DORA: What It Is, What It Has Achieved, and Where It Still Falls Short

The San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment — universally known as DORA — was drafted at the 2012 Annual Meeting of the American Society for Cell Biology and published in 2013. Its core recommendation is direct: do not use journal-based metrics, such as the Journal Impact Factor, as a surrogate measure of the quality of individual research articles, to assess an individual scientist's contributions, or in hiring, promotion, or funding decisions.

More than 26,000 individuals and organisations in 171 countries have signed DORA to date — research funders, research institutions, publishers, metrics providers, and researchers themselves. DORA's new guidelines emphasise clarity, transparency, specificity, context, and fairness. The guidance aims to prevent oversimplification in research assessments by requiring institutions to be clear about the rationale for using particular quantitative indicators and to develop rules for their use in dialogue with the research community.

The gap between the number of DORA signatories and the actual behaviour of institutions is the central challenge of research assessment reform. Signing DORA is a public commitment; implementing it requires changing the habits, incentive structures, and evaluation processes of thousands of promotion committees, hiring panels, and grant review boards whose members were themselves trained and promoted under the impact factor system.

What DORA has achieved is significant nonetheless: it has created a shared vocabulary and a shared standard that institutions, funders, and researchers can use to hold each other accountable. Increasingly, the question is not whether institutions aspire to DORA-compliant evaluation but whether they have the operational infrastructure to conduct evaluation without falling back on the convenient shortcut of journal metrics.

The Narrative CV: The Most Consequential Change Actually Underway

The most significant practical change in research evaluation in 2025 and 2026 is not DORA itself but the narrative CV — a structured alternative to the traditional academic CV that replaces the publication list as the primary document through which researchers communicate their contributions.

There is a growing consensus that the conventional academic CV — containing a list of achievements and particularly a long list of publications — has led to pressures to publish, which in turn have driven questionable research practices, authorship disputes, research misconduct, and in some research fields a loss in trust of the published literature.

UKRI, the UK's main research funding body, adopted the Résumé for Research and Innovation (R4RI) format in 2021 for all funding opportunities that require a track record. In this format, researchers describe their experience in four modules:

The list of funders that have adopted or are actively piloting R4RI-like narrative CV formats is substantial and growing: Alzheimer's Research UK, British Heart Foundation, Cancer Research UK, Dutch Research Council, Health Research Board, Leverhulme Trust, Luxembourg National Research Fund, Medical Research Foundation, NIHR, Royal Academy of Engineering, Science Foundation Ireland, Swiss National Science Foundation, Wellcome, and many others. The Joint Funders Group brings together 54 funders — both UK-based and international — that support the wider adoption of narrative CVs.

What the narrative CV actually requires researchers to do is different from what the publication list required: rather than presenting a list of outputs and letting the reader infer significance from journal names and citation counts, the narrative CV asks researchers to articulate — in their own words — what their contributions actually were, why they mattered, what impact they had, and what skills and relationships they brought to bear in producing them.

For researchers who have been shaped by the publication list culture, this is both liberating and uncomfortable. Liberating because contributions that have always been real — mentorship, community building, software development, data curation, policy engagement, public communication — can now be described and evaluated rather than invisible. Uncomfortable because the narrative CV requires exactly the kind of reflective self-description that scientific training typically discourages in favour of objective reporting of results.

Altmetrics: What They Measure, What They Don't, and How They Are Actually Being Used

Altmetrics — alternative metrics that track online attention to published research through social media mentions, news coverage, blog references, policy citations, and Mendeley saves — have been discussed as a complement to citation-based evaluation since the term was coined in 2010. Their uptake in actual research evaluation has been slower than advocates anticipated and more consequential than sceptics predicted.

The current consensus in the responsible metrics community is that altmetrics are genuinely useful as evidence of a specific type of impact — societal attention, public engagement, policy influence — that citation counts are structurally unable to capture, and genuinely misleading when used as a proxy for scientific quality or influence within a discipline.

The specific uses of altmetrics that are well-supported by evidence:

• In grant applications where policy impact is relevant

  A paper cited in three European Commission policy documents, mentioned in twelve news articles, and saved by 800 researchers on Mendeley has demonstrably reached beyond the academic community. This is precisely the kind of societal impact that funders with public benefit mandates are designed to support, and altmetric data provides the evidence in a form that is verifiable, quantified, and not dependent on citation counts that take years to accumulate.

• In university communications and impact reporting

  Altmetric scores provide the communications team with evidence of public reach that can be reported to institutional leadership, to funding bodies, and to the press, without requiring specialist bibliometric expertise to interpret. A paper with an Altmetric score of 300 has demonstrably generated significant public attention regardless of the journal it was published in.

• In promotion cases where breadth of impact matters

  For researchers being evaluated on criteria that include public engagement, knowledge exchange, or societal impact — criteria that are increasingly explicit in DORA-aligned promotion frameworks — altmetric data provides quantified evidence of contributions that were previously invisible to evaluation committees.

The uses of altmetrics that are not well-supported are as proxies for scientific quality, disciplinary influence, or the significance of a result within its field. A paper that generates high altmetric attention is often a paper that is accessible, timely, and written for a broad audience — which correlates imperfectly at best with being correct, rigorous, or important to the specialists who will build on it.

The Leiden Manifesto and CoARA: The Frameworks Shaping Institutional Practice

Two additional frameworks have shaped research assessment reform in ways that complement DORA and deserve mention in any practical guide to the changing evaluation landscape.

The Leiden Manifesto, published in Nature in 2015 by a group of bibliometricians and science policy researchers, established ten principles for the responsible use of research metrics. Unlike DORA, which advocates for moving away from specific metrics, the Leiden Manifesto accepts that quantitative indicators will continue to be used and focuses on how to use them responsibly — with appropriate context, disciplinary sensitivity, and transparency about what each metric does and does not measure.

The Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment (CoARA), launched by the European Commission and a consortium of European research organisations in 2022, represents the most institutionally ambitious attempt to coordinate reform at scale. CoARA brings together universities, research performing organisations, and funders from across Europe to commit to shared principles for research assessment — including the principle that research assessment should not be determined solely or primarily by publication venues or journal-based metrics.

The Netherlands' "Recognition and Rewards" reform — which explicitly values open science, team science, leadership, and societal impact alongside traditional research output — is the most cited example of a national research system that has made structural changes to evaluation rather than simply signing declarations. Dutch universities and research funders announced this new system in 2019, and it is also, notably, the context in which the narrative CV has been most thoroughly piloted and from which some of the most useful implementation guidance has emerged.

What This Means in Practice: A Guide for Four Audiences

• For university PR offices

  The shift toward DORA-compliant evaluation is an opportunity, not merely a compliance challenge

  When researchers are being evaluated on a broader range of contributions — public engagement, policy influence, community leadership, knowledge exchange — the communications team has more material to work with, more stories to tell, and a stronger case for the institution's broader social value. Building systematic processes for collecting, monitoring, and reporting altmetric data for significant publications is a communications investment with direct institutional value.

• For department heads and promotion committees

  The practical challenge is developing evaluator skills to assess narrative evidence fairly

  The impact factor created a convenient illusion of objectivity: a number that required no interpretive skill. Assessing a researcher's narrative account of their contributions requires reading carefully, contextualising appropriately, and resisting the temptation to default to publication lists when the narrative is ambiguous. Training for evaluation committee members in how to read narrative CVs, apply consistent criteria, and identify bias is now available and should be used.

• For grant applicants preparing narrative CVs

  The four modules are an invitation to describe the totality of your contribution

  Knowledge and ideas, developing others, wider research community contributions, and societal impact — these are not merely bureaucratic categories. They are an invitation to describe the totality of your contribution to science in terms relevant to funders who care about more than output volume. The most effective narrative CVs are specific, evidence-based, and honest about the context of contributions — not promotional documents but reflective accounts of what was actually done and why it mattered.

• For early-career researchers

  The shift is significantly better for you than the system it is replacing

  The impact factor system systematically disadvantaged people without the established networks to place work in top-tier journals, people who worked on unfashionable problems, and people whose most significant contributions — to supervision, to methodology development, to open science infrastructure — were invisible in a system that only counted publications. The narrative CV makes those contributions visible. Use it.

The Gap That Remains

The honest assessment of where research evaluation reform stands in 2026 is that the direction is clear, the momentum is real, and the gap between aspiration and practice remains large. Promotion committees at institutions that have formally signed DORA still use impact factor as a shortcut. Grant applications that formally accept narrative CVs are still reviewed by committee members who instinctively search for the Nature and Science publications in a candidate's record.

This gap is not a reason for cynicism. It is a reason for researchers, institutions, and the PR offices that communicate their work to be deliberate about the evidence they provide, the frameworks they reference, and the language they use to describe contributions that the old system made invisible. The evaluation landscape is changing. The change is uneven. And the researchers who understand what is changing — and who build their self-presentation accordingly — are better positioned than those who continue to optimise for metrics that the most forward-looking funders are actively trying to move away from.