Some of you in UK may already know that HEFCE proposed a new way to assess and fund research in UK. One of the biggest changes is that they want to use the actual number of citations of each article rather than the impact factor of the publishing journal to measure the impact of the work. According to the research carried out by Leiden University, a paper with three times or more citation than average can be considered as “excellent performance in international perspective”. Because an average biomedical paper is roughly cited 10 times, your publication should be cited 30 times or more to be considered “excellent”.

Although I understand why HEFCE is proposing, I am extremely concerned that a young PI like me would suffer significantly in the next RAE. It will take five to ten years to access the citation impact of each article and I have few publications which would date back that far. Also I feel pressure that I have to publish articles which are likely to be cited quickly. Such articles are perhaps co-authored by well-known senior researchers and in pace with current trends of the field, while my desire is to cultivate a new field of research from scratch without influence from seniors. Maybe I am a bit naïve and over-ambitious but I am feeling that artificial metrics like this is going to suffocate my research.