  Many different measures are used to assess academic research excellence and
these are subject to ongoing discussion and debate within the scientometric,
university-management and policy-making communities internationally. One topic
of continued importance is the extent to which citation-based indicators
compare with peer-review-based evaluation. Here we analyse the correlations
between values of a particular citation-based impact indicator and peer-review
scores in several academic disciplines, from natural to social sciences and
humanities. We perform the comparison for research groups rather than for
individuals. We make comparisons on two levels. At an absolute level, we
compare total impact and overall strength of the group as a whole. At a
specific level, we compare academic impact and quality, normalised by the size
of the group. We find very high correlations at the former level for some
disciplines and poor correlations at the latter level for all disciplines. This
means that, although the citation-based scores could help to describe
research-group strength, in particular for the so-called hard sciences, they
should not be used as a proxy for ranking or comparison of research groups.
Moreover, the correlation between peer-evaluated and citation-based scores is
weaker for soft sciences.
