FAM Statement: Miami University Must Not Rely on SciVal

November 1, 2025

The Faculty Alliance of Miami (FAM, AAUP-AFT Local 375) issues this statement to express its reservations about the use of the SciVal database to measure faculty’s scholarly productivity and, in turn, to use that data as part of departmental budgeting through RCM 4.0. Below we outline our specific concerns:

 1) SciVal is inherently discriminatory.

• According to SciVal’s own documentation, there are multiple fields (Arts and Humanities; Business, Management and Accounting; Economics, Econometrics and Finance; and Social Sciences) where fewer than half of citations link to documents that are indexed by Scopus. Regardless of how much faculty in those fields publish, their SciVal scores will be artificially limited. Worst of all, SciVal has a limited database of standalone books. Fields where book publication is a disciplinary expectation – English and other literature fields, History, Philosophy, among others – are ignored by SciVal. This is especially concerning given that the main metric, Field Weighted Citation Impact (FWCI), has limited reliability in smaller samples. 

2) SciVal constitutes an unsettling version of a “pay-to-play” model and thus creates conflicts of interest.

• SciVal is owned by Elsevier which, in turn, owns many scholarly journals and the Scopus Database which SciVal relies upon. The current response to concerns over SciVal has been for faculty to spend time adding their own data to the Scopus database. By doing so we improve Elsevier’s product, giving SciVal a stronger argument for why they should be used in US News and World Report. Miami is in fact paying Elsevier so that the faculty can be pressured into improving Elsevier’s product. 

3) The metrics selected by Miami are not equitable across disciplines. 

• According to the presentation from Sr. Vice President for Finance and Business Services, David Creamer, Miami leadership intends to use 4 metrics from SciVal: Citations per Publication; Field Weighted Citation Impact; Share of Citations in the top 5% of most cited journals; and Share of Citations in the top 25% of most cited journals. Although FWCI accounts for disciplinary differences, the remaining metrics do not. SciVal’s documentation explicitly warns against this: “It is typically very important in these situations that variables besides differences in performance have been accounted for to ensure that the assessment is fair; it would not be advisable to compare chemistry and immunology using metrics that do not take into account the tendency for higher output and citation rates in immunology, for instance.”

4) SciVal is redundant and thus a waste of university money.

• Miami University already subscribes to the Web of Science platform. The information collected by the two platforms overlaps substantially. Given current budget constraints, the purchase of access to another platform for an undisclosed value is concerning.  

5) SciVal is a threat to academic freedom.

• Tying SciVal numbers to departmental funding, as RCM 4.0 does, creates an enormous pressure on faculty, who care deeply about the health and future of their departments, to publish in top SciVal journals (a list which often conflicts with expert knowledge of the discipline). In essence, departments whose members score low with SciVal will be punished. This represents an unacceptable intrusion by the administration into the free and open exchange of ideas by faculty which is at the heart of academic freedom.

FAM urges Miami to remove SciVal from its budgeting model and to reaffirm its commitment to faculty by recognizing all the ways in which their research is shared with colleagues around the country and around the world. At a minimum, we believe that any use of SciVal metrics should, in line with their own documentation, be part of a process of triangulation that include “peer review, expert opinion, and information from a quantitative evidence-base.”