The Leiden Manifesto for Research Metrics sets out ten principles, published as a comment in Nature in 2015, for the responsible use of quantitative indicators in research evaluation. Research offices can convert each principle into a direct audit question, testing whether KPI dashboards, promotion criteria and grant-review rubrics rely on a single metric, ignore field norms, or substitute for qualitative judgement.
The Leiden Manifesto for Research Metrics is a ten-principle framework for the responsible use of bibliometric and other quantitative indicators in evaluating research, published by Diana Hicks, Paul Wouters, Ludo Waltman, Sarah de Rijcke and Ismael Rafols in Nature on 22 April 2015. It was formulated at the 19th International Conference on Science and Technology Indicators, held in Leiden, the Netherlands, in September 2014, and has since been cited more than 4,000 times, according to Google Scholar’s tracking of the original paper.
- What is the Leiden Manifesto for Research Metrics?
- What are the ten principles of the Leiden Manifesto?
- How can a research office audit its KPI and promotion framework against it?
- How does the Leiden Manifesto compare with DORA and CoARA?
- Common questions and what comes next for research offices
What is the Leiden Manifesto for Research Metrics?
The Leiden Manifesto is a response to what its authors called “impact-factor obsession” — the tendency of universities, funders and promotion committees to substitute a single number for expert judgement. It does not ban metrics. It requires that quantitative indicators support, rather than replace, informed peer assessment of research quality.
The manifesto’s home institution is the Centre for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS) at Leiden University, where co-author Paul Wouters served as director. CWTS also produces the CWTS Leiden Ranking, a separate bibliometrics-based university ranking — a distinction research offices should not conflate when citing the source.
What are the ten principles of the Leiden Manifesto?
Each principle addresses a specific failure mode observed in metric-driven research assessment. The table below states each principle exactly as published, alongside the practical audit question a research office should ask of its own KPI or promotion framework.
| # | Principle (Hicks et al., 2015) | Audit question for your office |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Quantitative evaluation should support qualitative, expert assessment | Does any committee decision rest on a metric alone, with no narrative peer input? |
| 2 | Measure performance against the research missions of the institution, group or researcher | Are KPIs generic, or tailored to the unit’s stated mission (teaching-intensive, applied, translational)? |
| 3 | Protect excellence in locally relevant research | Does the framework penalise work published in non-English or regionally focused outlets? |
| 4 | Keep data collection and analytical processes open, transparent and simple | Can an academic reproduce their own score from publicly documented methodology? |
| 5 | Allow those evaluated to verify data and analysis | Is there a formal, timely route to challenge or correct metric data before a decision is made? |
| 6 | Account for variation by field in publication and citation practices | Are raw citation counts compared across disciplines without field normalisation? |
| 7 | Base assessment of individual researchers on a qualitative judgement of their portfolio | Does promotion criteria require a portfolio narrative, or just an h-index threshold? |
| 8 | Avoid misplaced concreteness and false precision | Are decimal-point differences in impact factor or citation rate treated as meaningful? |
| 9 | Recognise the systemic effects of assessment and indicators | Has the office assessed whether its KPIs create incentives to game submission counts or venues? |
| 10 | Scrutinise indicators regularly and update them | Is there a scheduled review cycle for the KPI framework itself, not just for scores against it? |
How can a research office audit its KPI and promotion framework against it?
Running the manifesto as a live audit tool means working through each principle against real artefacts: the appraisal form, the promotion rubric, and the departmental dashboard.
- Mark every clause in the promotion/tenure criteria naming a specific metric (impact factor, h-index, citation count).
- Check each marked clause has a qualitative narrative requirement alongside it (Principles 1 and 7).
- Confirm KPI targets are set per unit mission, not copied institution-wide (Principle 2).
- Check non-English-language or applied outputs score on the same scale as high-impact-journal outputs (Principle 3).
- Verify each dashboard metric’s data source and calculation method is documented and accessible (Principles 4 and 5).
- Confirm citation indicators are field-normalised, not raw counts compared across disciplines (Principle 6).
- Look for false precision — ranking staff by two-decimal citation averages (Principle 8).
- Ask whether the KPI framework has driven any unintended behaviour, such as salami-slicing publications or discouraging risky research (Principle 9).
- Set a fixed review date for the framework itself, independent of individual appraisal cycles (Principle 10).
A framework that fails more than two or three of these checks is not aligned with the manifesto, regardless of how sophisticated its dashboard software looks. The most common failure in practice is Principle 6: comparing raw citation counts across a mathematics department and a cell biology department, where top-ranked mathematics journals carry impact factors around 3 while top-ranked cell biology journals carry impact factors around 30 — a field-scale gap the manifesto’s authors cite directly as evidence that uncorrected cross-field comparison is meaningless.
How does the Leiden Manifesto compare with DORA and CoARA?
The Leiden Manifesto did not appear in isolation. The 2013 San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) preceded it, while the Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment (CoARA) has since built a sector-wide agreement on reforming assessment practice. Research offices are frequently asked which one to adopt.
| Framework | Published | Format | Primary focus |
|---|---|---|---|
| Leiden Manifesto | 22 April 2015 (Nature comment) | 10 principles | Correct use of quantitative indicators across disciplines and settings |
| DORA | 2013 (San Francisco Declaration) | General recommendations + signatory pledge | Eliminating journal impact factor as a proxy for article or researcher quality |
| CoARA | 2022 (Agreement on Reforming Research Assessment) | Institutional commitment agreement | Sector-wide reform of hiring, promotion and funding assessment criteria |
DORA has been signed by more than 27,000 individuals and organisations, according to DORA’s own published tally as of March 2026, making it the higher-profile pledge. But when Loughborough University’s LIS-Bibliometrics committee chose a framework for its own policy in 2018, policy manager Elizabeth Gadd selected the Leiden Manifesto because it takes a “broader approach to the responsible use of all bibliometrics across a range of disciplines and settings” — not only journal-level metrics. Elsevier separately announced on 14 July 2020 that it would use the manifesto’s principles to guide its CiteScore methodology.
In the UK, the independently commissioned Metric Tide review (2015), led by James Wilsdon for the then Higher Education Funding Council for England, reached compatible conclusions and recommended metrics support, not replace, peer review within the research administration processes underpinning the Research Excellence Framework. A research office building a REF-adjacent KPI policy should treat the two as aligned, not competing, references.
Common questions and what comes next for research offices
Who wrote the Leiden Manifesto for Research Metrics?
The manifesto was written by Diana Hicks, professor of public policy at Georgia Institute of Technology, and Paul Wouters, then director of CWTS at Leiden University, together with co-authors Ludo Waltman, Sarah de Rijcke and Ismael Rafols. It was published as a comment in Nature, volume 520, on 22 April 2015.
Does the Leiden Manifesto ban the use of bibliometrics tools?
No. The manifesto does not prohibit bibliometrics tools such as Web of Science, Scopus or Dimensions. It requires that any output from these tools — citation counts, h-indices, journal metrics — be interpreted alongside qualitative expert review and adjusted for field-specific citation norms before it informs a decision.
Why does the importance of bibliometrics remain contested?
Bibliometrics matter because they scale evaluation across thousands of researchers where individual peer review is impractical. The contested part is misuse: treating a single indicator as an objective proxy for quality, rather than one input alongside portfolio review, mission fit and field context, as the manifesto’s ten principles specify.
How often should a research office review its KPI framework under the manifesto?
Principle 10 requires indicators to be “scrutinised regularly and updated,” but sets no fixed interval. Good institutional practice, reflected in library and research-office guidance built on the manifesto, is an annual technical review of data sources plus a full policy review on the same three-to-five-year cycle as promotion-criteria revisions.
The Leiden Manifesto’s ten principles were written as durable evaluation ethics, not a one-time compliance exercise. As institutions layer AI-assisted analytics, altmetrics and funder-mandated open-data reporting onto existing KPI frameworks, the manifesto’s core requirement — that quantitative evaluation support, not replace, expert judgement — becomes harder to satisfy by default and more important to audit deliberately. Research offices that build the checklist above into their annual promotion-criteria review cycle, rather than treating the manifesto as background reading, are the ones actually applying it.