Assessment of research performance in biology: How well do peer review and bibliometry correlate?

Bibliometric indices based on publishing output, and citation records used to measure scientific quality, are increasingly being employed to supplement and even replace traditional alternatives, such as the peer-review system. In this article we question whether peer review can predict bibliometric indices for individual researchers. We compared the ratings of scientific quality obtained using a peer-review system with the most popular bibliometric scores (h-, m-, and g-indices; total citations, and mean number of citations per publication) for 163 botanists and zoologists. Although the peer-review ratings were correlated with the bibliometric measures, they explained less than 40 percent of the variation in the scores. Most of this unexplained variation is presumably due to limitations of both the peer-review system and bibliometric scores. We propose a synergy between peer-review and bibliometric scores that can improve the assessment of scientific quality, especially by bench marking peer-review decisions against bibliometric thresholds.