IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/rseval/v29y2020i2p215-230..html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Like-for-like bibliometric substitutes for peer review: Advantages and limits of indicators calculated from the ep index

Author

Listed:
  • Alonso Rodríguez-Navarro
  • Ricardo Brito

Abstract

The use of bibliometric indicators would simplify research assessments. The 2014 Research Excellence Framework (REF) is a peer review assessment of UK universities, whose results can be taken as benchmarks for bibliometric indicators. In this study, we use the REF results to investigate whether the ep index and a top percentile of most cited papers could substitute for peer review. The probability that a random university’s paper reaches a certain top percentile in the global distribution of papers is a power of the ep index, which can be calculated from the citation-based distribution of university’s papers in global top percentiles. Making use of the ep index in each university and research area, we calculated the ratios between the percentage of 4-star-rated outputs in REF and the percentages of papers in global top percentiles. Then, we fixed the assessment percentile so that the mean ratio between these two indicators across universities is 1.0. This method was applied to four units of assessment in REF: Chemistry, Economics and Econometrics joined to Business and Management Studies, and Physics. Some relevant deviations from the 1.0 ratio could be explained by the evaluation procedure in REF or by the characteristics of the research field; other deviations need specific studies by experts in the research area. These results indicate that in many research areas the substitution of a top percentile indicator for peer review is possible. However, this substitution cannot be made straightforwardly; more research is needed to establish the conditions of the bibliometric assessment.

Suggested Citation

  • Alonso Rodríguez-Navarro & Ricardo Brito, 2020. "Like-for-like bibliometric substitutes for peer review: Advantages and limits of indicators calculated from the ep index," Research Evaluation, Oxford University Press, vol. 29(2), pages 215-230.
    • Handle: RePEc:oup:rseval:v:29:y:2020:i:2:p:215-230.
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/reseval/rvaa002
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Brito, Ricardo & Navarro, Alonso Rodríguez, 2021. "The inconsistency of h-index: A mathematical analysis," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 15(1).
    2. Alonso Rodríguez-Navarro & Ricardo Brito, 2022. "The link between countries’ economic and scientific wealth has a complex dependence on technological activity and research policy," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 127(5), pages 2871-2896, May.
    3. Bornmann, Lutz & Ganser, Christian & Tekles, Alexander, 2022. "Simulation of the h index use at university departments within the bibliometrics-based heuristics framework: Can the indicator be used to compare individual researchers?," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 16(1).

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:oup:rseval:v:29:y:2020:i:2:p:215-230.. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Oxford University Press (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://academic.oup.com/rev .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.