On the agreement between bibliometrics and peer review: evidence from the Italian research assessment exercises

TL;DR

This study evaluates the agreement between bibliometric measures and peer review in Italian research assessments, finding weak concordance at the article level across sciences, questioning the dual evaluation system's validity.

Contribution

It provides a rigorous statistical analysis of the concordance between bibliometrics and peer review, highlighting limitations of the dual evaluation system in research assessments.

Findings

Weak agreement between bibliometrics and peer review at article level

Dual system does not validate replacing peer review with metrics

Potential biases introduced by cost-cutting evaluation methods

Abstract

This paper appraises the concordance between bibliometrics and peer review, by drawing evidence from the data of two experiments realized by the Italian governmental agency for research evaluation. The experiments were performed for validating the dual system of evaluation, consisting in the interchangeable use of bibliometyrics and peer review, adopted by the agency in the research assessment exercises. The two experiments were based on stratified random samples of journal articles. Each article was scored by bibliometrics and by peer review. The degree of concordance between the two evaluations is then computed. The correct setting of the experiments is defined by developing the design-based estimation of the Cohen's kappa coefficient and some testing procedures for assessing the homogeneity of missing proportions between strata. The results of both experiments show that for each research areas of hard sciences, engineering and life sciences, the degree of agreement between bibliometrics and peer review is -- at most -- weak at an individual article level. Thus, the outcome of the experiments does not validate the use of the dual system of evaluation in the Italian research assessments. More in general, the very weak concordance indicates that metrics should not replace peer review at the level of individual article. Hence, the use of the dual system of evaluation for reducing costs might introduce unknown biases in a research assessment exercise.