Practicing responsible research assessment: Qualitative study of faculty hiring, promotion, and tenure assessments in the United States

Abstract Recent times have seen the growth in the number and scope of interacting professional reform movements in science, centered on themes such as open research, research integrity, responsible research assessment, and responsible metrics. The responsible metrics movement identifies the growing influence of quantitative performance indicators as a major problem and seeks to steer and improve practices around their use. It is a multi-actor, multi-disciplinary reform movement premised upon engendering a sense of responsibility among academic evaluators to approach metrics with caution and avoid certain poor practices. In this article we identify how academic evaluators engage with the responsible metrics agenda, via semi-structured interview and open-text survey responses on professorial hiring, tenure and promotion assessments among senior academics in the United States—a country that has so far been less visibly engaged with the responsible metrics reform agenda. We explore how notions of ‘responsibility’ are experienced and practiced among the very types of professionals international reform initiatives such as the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) are hoping to mobilize into their cause. In doing so, we draw on concepts from science studies, including from literatures on Responsible Research and Innovation and ‘folk theories’ of citation. We argue that literature on citation folk theories should extend its scope beyond simply asking researchers how they view the role and validity of these tools as performance measures, by asking them also what they consider are their professional obligations to handle bibliometrics appropriately.