  In this work we propose a metric to assess academic productivity based on
publication outputs. We are interested in knowing how well a research group in
an area of knowledge is doing relatively to a pre-selected set of reference
groups, where each group is composed by academics or researchers. To assess
academic productivity we propose a new metric, which we call P-score. Our
metric P-score assigns weights to venues using only the publication patterns of
selected reference groups. This implies that P-score does not depend on
citation data and thus, that it is simpler to compute particularly in contexts
in which citation data is not easily available. Also, preliminary experiments
suggest that P-score preserves strong correlation with citation-based metrics.
