  Following Funk and Owen-Smith (2017), Wu et al. (2019) proposed the
disruption index (DI1) as a bibliometric indicator that measures disruptive and
consolidating research. When we summarized the literature on the disruption
index for our recently published review article (Leibel & Bornmann, 2024), we
noticed that the calculation of disruption scores comes with numerous (hidden)
degrees of freedom. In this Letter to the Editor, we explain why this
analytical flexibility endangers the credibility of bibliometric research based
on the DI1 (and its variants) and advertise the application of multiverse-style
methods to increase the transparency of the research.
