  To manage the problem of having a higher demand for resources than
availability of funds, research funding agencies usually rank the major
research groups in their area of knowledge. This ranking relies on a careful
analysis of the research groups in terms of their size, number of PhDs
graduated, research results and their impact, among other variables. While
research results are not the only variable to consider, they are frequently
given special attention because of the notoriety they confer to the researchers
and the programs they are affiliated with. In here we introduce a new metric
for quantifying publication output, called R-Score for reputation-based score,
which can be used in support to the ranking of research groups or programs. The
novelty is that the metric depends solely on the listings of the publications
of the members of a group, with no dependency on citation counts. R-Score has
some interesting properties: (a) it does not require access to the contents of
published material, (b) it can be curated to produce highly accurate results,
and (c) it can be naturally used to compare publication output of research
groups (e.g., graduate programs) inside a same country, geographical area, or
across the world. An experiment comparing the publication output of 25 CS
graduate programs from Brazil suggests that R-Score can be quite useful for
providing early insights into the publication patterns of the various research
groups one wants to compare.
