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This paper presents a quantitative comparison of peer versus bibliometric procedures for rating the quality of U.S. universities. The peer ratings used are the Roose-Andersen rating of the quality of graduate faculty in 10 scientific fields. The bibliometric ratings used are (1) the number of university papers in each field; (2) the average "quality" of the papers based on their citation rates, expressed as influence per paper in each field; and (3) total 0.76, 0.83, and 0.87 were obtained for mathematics, physics, and chemistry, respectively. Drew and Karpf examined several other objective factors for ranking departments but found that none of these gave correlations as high as the rate of publication.

A survey was undertaken to ascertain the extent of agreement between scientists' subjective assessment o f the average influence per article for articles in 58 different scientific journals, when compared with corresponding citation influence ratings for articles in the same journals. The scientists' assessments were derived from questionnaires sent to faculty at 97 American universities covering journals in ten different research fields. A strong positive relationship was found to exist between the scientists' assessment of journal influence and the citation influence ratings, with productmoment and Spearman rank correlations in the 0.7-0.9 range for seven of the ten fields.

An investigation of the relationship between National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding and the quantity and nature of biomedical publications is reported for 120 U.S. medical school complexes. A correlation of 0.95 was found between the amount of NIH funds received and the number of biomedical publications from the medical schools. Medical school ranks based on bibliometric measures were found to correlate at the 0.80-0.90 level with ranks based on peer assessments of the schools. The characteristics of the medical school papers varied with the type of school. The average citation influence per paper increased with the publication size of the schools. This was true even when factors such as public versus private control, geographic region, average research level (from basic to clinical), and subject emphasis were controlled. The positive relationship between number of papers from a school and its citation influence holds within individual research levels and within subfields.