Research Article: “Peer Review vs Bibliometrics: Which Method Better Predicts the Scholarly Impact of Publications?”

The following full text article (open access version) was recently shared on arXiv. The final version appears in the October 2019 issue of Scientometrics.

Title

Peer Review vs Bibliometrics: Which Method Better Predicts the Scholarly Impact of Publications?

Authors

Giovanni Abramo
National Research Council, Rome, Italy

Ciriaco Andrea D’Angelo
University of Rome

Emanuela Reale
National Research Council, Rome, Italy

Source

via arXiv
Final Version Published in: Scientometrics
October 2019, Volume 121, Issue 1

Abstract

In this work, we try to answer the question of which method, peer review vs bibliometrics, better predicts the future overall scholarly impact of scientific publications. We measure the agreement between peer review evaluations of Web of Science indexed publications submitted to the first Italian research assessment exercise and long-term citations of the same publications. We do the same for an early citation-based indicator. We find that the latter shows stronger predictive power, i.e., it more reliably predicts late citations in all the disciplinary areas examined, and for any citation time window starting one year after publication.

Direct to Full Text Article
19 pages; PDF.

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