  The increasing use of productivity and impact metrics for evaluation and
comparison, not only of individual researchers but also of institutions,
universities and even countries, has prompted the development of bibliometrics.
Currently, metrics are becoming widely accepted as an easy and balanced way to
assist the peer review and evaluation of scientists and/or research units,
provided they have adequate precision and recall.
  This paper presents a benchmarking study of a selected list of representative
Portuguese research units, based on a fairly complete set of parameters:
bibliometric parameters, number of competitive projects and number of PhDs
produced. The study aimed at collecting productivity and impact data from the
selected research units in comparable conditions i.e., using objective metrics
based on public information, retrievable on-line and/or from official sources
and thus verifiable and repeatable. The study has thus focused on the activity
of the 2003-06 period, where such data was available from the latest official
evaluation.
  The main advantage of our study was the application of automatic tools,
achieving relevant results at a reduced cost. Moreover, the results over the
selected units suggest that this kind of analyses will be very useful to
benchmark scientific productivity and impact, and assist peer review.
