  Most Performance-based Research Funding Systems (PRFS) draw on peer review
and bibliometric indicators, two different methodologies which are sometimes
combined. A common argument against the use of indicators in such research
evaluation exercises is their low correlation at the article level with peer
review judgments. In this study, we analyse 191,000 papers from 154 higher
education institutes which were peer reviewed in a national research evaluation
exercise. We combine these data with 6.95 million citations to the original
papers. We show that when citation-based indicators are applied at the
institutional or departmental level, rather than at the level of individual
papers, surprisingly large correlations with peer review judgments can be
observed, up to r <= 0.802, n = 37, p < 0.001 for some disciplines. In our
evaluation of ranking prediction performance based on citation data, we show we
can reduce the mean rank prediction error by 25% compared to previous work.
This suggests that citation-based indicators are sufficiently aligned with peer
review results at the institutional level to be used to lessen the overall
burden of peer review on national evaluation exercises leading to considerable
cost savings.
