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Absolute and specific measures of research group excellence

A desirable goal of scientific management is to introduce, if it exists, a simple and reliable way to measure the scientific excellence of publicly-funded research institutions and universities to serve as a basis for their ranking and financing. While citation-based indicators and metrics are easily accessible, they are far from being universally accepted as way to automate or inform evaluation processes or to replace evaluations based on peer review. Here we consider absolute measurements of research excellence at an amalgamated, institutional level and specific measures of research excellence as performance per head. Using biology research institutions in the UK as a test case, we examine the correlations between peer-review-based and citation-based measures of research excellence on these two scales. We find that citation-based indicators are very highly correlated with peer-evaluated measures of group strength but are poorly correlated with group quality. Thus, and almost paradoxically, our analysis indicates that citation counts could possibly form a basis for deciding on how to fund research institutions but they should not be used as a basis for ranking them in terms of quality.