Necessity of Developing a National Index to Evaluate Iranian Health Researchers

Evaluation of researchers has long been performed by scientific organizations, but today regarding the increase in publications and the complexity of the evaluation processes, the new approaches are employed often by using scientometric indicators. Despite diversity of evaluation indicators, they are accompanied by drawbacks that amongst them, the lack of a comprehensive indicator for multidimensional evaluation of researchers in terms of national dimensions is perhaps prominent. The major available scientometric indicators consider the number of articles of a person as well as the number of citations received of those articles as an indicator for quality of research work. The criterion of citing for measuring these indicators has led to criticisms of existing indicators. On the other hand, in Iranian educational organizations, the quality of the journal wherein the article is published is considered as one of the major criteria for evaluating researchers. The San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) clearly states that journal-based metrics, such as the journal impact factor, should not be used as a substitute for the quality of research papers and evaluation of researchers, recruitment, financial decisions, or promotion of them. Moreover, according to the sixth principle of Leiden's statement, a suitable way for researcher’s evaluation is the selection of a set of possible criteria by scientific and educational institutions. In view of this, it seems indispensable to develop a national author-centered index to measure quantitatively and qualitatively the works of Iranian health researchers according to their official language, scientific and cultural needs, and various fields of health. This index can be a combination of components of current indicators but has the ability to adapt with the conditions of our country.