Metrics and peer review agreement at the institutional level

Abstract

In the past decades, many countries have started to fund academic institutions based on the evaluation of their scientific performance. In this context, peer review is often used to assess scientific performance. Bibliometric indicators have been suggested as an alternative. A recurrent question in this context is whether peer review and metrics tend to yield similar outcomes. In this paper, we study the agreement between bibliometric indicators and peer review at the institutional level. Additionally, we also quantify the internal agreement of peer review at the institutional level. We find that the level of agreement is generally higher at the institutional level than at the publication level. Overall, the agreement between metrics and peer review is on par with the internal agreement among two reviewers for certain fields of science. This suggests that for some fields, bibliometric indicators may possibly be considered as an alternative to peer review for national research assessment exercises.