Comparison of a citation-based indicator and peer review for absolute and specific measures of research-group excellence

TL;DR

This study compares citation-based impact indicators with peer review for research-group excellence across disciplines, finding high correlation for overall strength but weak correlation for normalized impact, especially in soft sciences.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive analysis of how citation metrics relate to peer review in assessing research-group quality across multiple disciplines.

Findings

High correlation between citation and peer review for research strength in some sciences.

Weak correlation for normalized impact measures across all disciplines.

Citation metrics are not reliable proxies for research quality in soft sciences.

Abstract

Many different measures are used to assess academic research excellence and these are subject to ongoing discussion and debate within the scientometric, university-management and policy-making communities internationally. One topic of continued importance is the extent to which citation-based indicators compare with peer-review-based evaluation. Here we analyse the correlations between values of a particular citation-based impact indicator and peer-review scores in several academic disciplines, from natural to social sciences and humanities. We perform the comparison for research groups rather than for individuals. We make comparisons on two levels. At an absolute level, we compare total impact and overall strength of the group as a whole. At a specific level, we compare academic impact and quality, normalised by the size of the group. We find very high correlations at the former level for some disciplines and poor correlations at the latter level for all disciplines. This means that, although the citation-based scores could help to describe research-group strength, in particular for the so-called hard sciences, they should not be used as a proxy for ranking or comparison of research groups. Moreover, the correlation between peer-evaluated and citation-based scores is weaker for soft sciences.