Open Access funding provided thanks to the CRUE-CSIC agreement with Springer Nature. No
funding was received for conducting this study.The authors would like to thank Daniel Pallarés-Domínguez for his help in the data
collection process and Mark Andrews for the English translation. We would also like to thank the three main
Spanish philosophy and ethics associations, Asociación Española de Ética y Filosofía Política (AEEFP),
Sociedad Académica de Filosofía (SAF) and Red Española de Filosofía (REF), for their collaboration during the research process and their endorsement of the data collection report.The knowledge and stance of researchers regarding bibliometric indicators is a feld of
study that has gained weight in recent decades. In this paper we address this issue for
the little explored areas of philosophy and ethics, and applied to a context, in this case
Spain, where bibliometric indicators are widely used in evaluation processes. The study
combines data from a self-administered questionnaire completed by 201 researchers and
from 14 in-depth interviews with researchers selected according to their afliation, professional category, gender and area of knowledge. The survey data suggest that researchers do
not consider bibliometric indicators a preferred criterion of quality, while there is a fairly
high self-perception of awareness of a number of indicators. The qualitative data points to
a generalised perception of a certain rejection of the specifc use of indicators, with four
main positions being observed: (1) disqualifcation of the logic of metrics, (2) scepticism
about the possibility of assessing quality with quantitative methods, (3) complaints about
the incorporation of methods that are considered to belong to other disciplines, and (4)
criticism of the consequences that this generates in the discipline of philosophy.CRUE-CSI
