Citation indicators and peer review: their time-scales, criteria of evaluation, and biases

Citations have been increasingly used in research evaluation in recent years. This paper assesses citations as a measure of performance by comparing them with peer judgment. It considers the differences of these two methods, and pays attention to some factors other than quality which potentially affect the accumulation of citations and the relative comparisons of research groups and university departments — orientation in basic or applied research and the rate of self-citations. The comparisons between citation counts and peer judgment produced inconsistent results. Self-citations did not at all affect the relative comparisons based on citations, and research orientation had less influence than expected. Copyright , Beech Tree Publishing.