How institutions assess researchers shapes how researchers behave. If hiring, promotion, and funding decisions reward sheer publication volume and the prestige of journals, then researchers will rationally pursue volume and prestige, sometimes at the expense of the careful, transparent, reproducible work that science depends on. The Hong Kong Principles for assessing researchers were developed to confront this misalignment head-on, by describing what responsible assessment should reward.
Where the principles came from
The Hong Kong Principles emerged from the 6th World Conference on Research Integrity, held in Hong Kong, and were set out in a paper led by David Moher and colleagues. They sit within a wider movement for reform in research assessment that includes the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) and the Leiden Manifesto, but their particular contribution is to link assessment criteria explicitly to the practices that uphold research integrity. Rather than only cautioning against the misuse of metrics, they propose positive things that institutions should look for and credit.
The five principles
The framework rests on five principles, each describing a dimension of responsible research that assessment should recognise:
- Assess responsible research practices. Reward researchers for conducting rigorous work and reporting it transparently and completely, including the methods that make a study trustworthy.
- Value complete reporting. Recognise full and transparent reporting of research, so that what was done and what was found can be understood and scrutinised, regardless of the direction of the results.
- Reward open science. Credit the practices of open research, including open methods, open data, and open materials, that allow others to verify and build on the work.
- Recognise a broad range of contributions. Acknowledge the diverse roles and activities that constitute research, including peer review, mentorship, and the production of datasets and software, not only authorship of articles.
- Reward open and reproducible practices in early-career assessment. Ensure that the criteria applied to those entering and progressing in research encourage, rather than discourage, openness and reproducibility.
Rewarding what actually matters
The common thread is a shift in what counts as evidence of a good researcher. Under conventional assessment, a long list of papers in well-regarded journals serves as a proxy for quality. The Hong Kong Principles argue that this proxy is weak and sometimes perverse: it can reward selective reporting, discourage the sharing of data and code, and overlook the many forms of work that make research robust. By asking assessors to look directly at responsible practices, the framework tries to make the proxy unnecessary.
This connects to familiar machinery for describing contributions. Frameworks such as CRediT make it possible to record who contributed what to a piece of work, including roles like data curation, software, and methodology that rarely show up in an author list alone. Recognising those contributions is exactly the kind of broadened view the principles call for.
What this asks of institutions
Adopting the Hong Kong Principles is not a matter of swapping one metric for another. It requires institutions to rethink the questions they ask when evaluating people. Instead of asking only how many papers a candidate has published and where, an assessment committee might ask whether the candidate shares data and code openly, whether their reporting is complete and transparent, whether their methods are sound, and whether they contribute to the research community through review, mentorship, and the stewardship of FAIR data. These are qualitative judgements, and they take more effort than counting, but they are closer to what assessment is supposed to measure.
Integrity by design
The deeper argument is that integrity cannot be bolted on through codes of conduct alone. If the incentive structure rewards the wrong things, exhortations to behave well will struggle against the grain. By aligning the rewards of a research career with the practices that make research trustworthy, the Hong Kong Principles try to build integrity into the system rather than treating it as an afterthought. They put openness, transparency, and reproducibility on the side of career success rather than in tension with it.
A practical starting point
No single framework will reform research assessment overnight, and the Hong Kong Principles are explicit that their adoption is a journey. But they give institutions a concrete vocabulary for change and a checklist of practices worth rewarding. For an organisation revising its promotion criteria, or a funder reconsidering how it judges applicants, they offer a defensible answer to a question that has too often gone unasked: when we assess researchers, what are we actually trying to measure, and are our criteria measuring it? The vocabularies catalogued in the CASRAI data dictionary can help express the contributions that result.
