DORA-compliant measures of research quality and impact to assess the performance of researchers in biomedical institutions: Review of published research, international best practice and Delphi survey.

OBJECTIVE: The San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) advocates for assessing biomedical research quality and impact, yet academic organizations continue to employ traditional measures such as Journal Impact Factor. We aimed to identify and prioritize measures for assessing research quality and impact. METHODS: We conducted a review of published and grey literature to identify measures of research quality and impact, which we included in an online survey. We assembled a panel of researchers and research leaders, and conducted a two-round Delphi survey to prioritize measures rated as high (rated 6 or 7 by ≥ 80% of respondents) or moderate (rated 6 or 7 by ≥ 50% of respondents) importance. RESULTS: We identified 50 measures organized in 8 domains: relevance of the research program, challenges to research program, or productivity, team/open science, funding, innovations, publications, other dissemination, and impact. Rating of measures by 44 panelists (60%) in Round One and 24 (55%) in Round Two of a Delphi survey resulted in consensus on the high importance of 5 measures: research advances existing knowledge, research plan is innovative, an independent body of research (or fundamental role) supported by peer-reviewed research funding, research outputs relevant to discipline, and quality of the content of publications. Five measures achieved consensus on moderate importance: challenges to research productivity, potential to improve health or healthcare, team science, collaboration, and recognition by professional societies or academic bodies. There was high congruence between researchers and research leaders across disciplines. CONCLUSIONS: Our work contributes to the field by identifying 10 DORA-compliant measures of research quality and impact, a more comprehensive and explicit set of measures than prior efforts. Research is needed to identify strategies to overcome barriers of use of DORA-compliant measures, and to "de-implement" traditional measures that do not uphold DORA principles yet are still in use.

Association of longitudinal cognitive decline with diffusion MRI in Gray Matter, Amyloid, and Tau deposition.

Extracellular amyloid plaques in gray matter are the earliest pathological marker for Alzheimer's disease (AD), followed by abnormal tau protein accumulation. The link between diffusion changes in gray matter, amyloid and tau pathology, and cognitive decline is not well understood. We first performed cross-sectional analyses on T1-weighted imaging, diffusion MRI, and amyloid and tau PETs from the ADNI 2/3 database. We evaluated cortical volume, free-water, fractional anisotropy (FA), and amyloid and tau SUVRs in 171 cognitively normal, 103 MCI, and 44 AD individuals. When the 3 groups were combined, increasing amyloid burden was associated with reduced extracellular free-water in the entorhinal cortex and hippocampus in those with amyloid-negative status whereas increasing tau burden was associated with increased extracellular free-water regardless of amyloid status. Next, we found that for the MCI subjects, diffusion measures (free-water, FA) alone predicted MMSE score 2 years later with a high r-square value (87%), as compared to tau SUVRs (27%), T1 volume (36%), and amyloid SUVRs (75%). Diffusion measures represent a potent non-invasive marker for predicting cognitive decline.