  In the past decades, many countries have started to fund academic
institutions based on the evaluation of their scientific performance. In this
context, post-publication peer review is often used to assess scientific
performance. Bibliometric indicators have been suggested as an alternative to
peer review. A recurrent question in this context is whether peer review and
metrics tend to yield similar outcomes. In this paper, we study the agreement
between bibliometric indicators and peer review based on a sample of
publications submitted for evaluation to the national Italian research
assessment exercise (2011--2014). In particular, we study the agreement between
bibliometric indicators and peer review at a higher aggregation level, namely
the institutional level. Additionally, we also quantify the internal agreement
of peer review at the institutional level. We base our analysis on a
hierarchical Bayesian model using cross-validation. We find that the level of
agreement is generally higher at the institutional level than at the
publication level. Overall, the agreement between metrics and peer review is on
par with the internal agreement among two reviewers for certain fields of
science in this particular context. This suggests that for some fields,
bibliometric indicators may possibly be considered as an alternative to peer
review for the Italian national research assessment exercise. Although results
do not necessarily generalise to other contexts, it does raise the question
whether similar findings would obtain for other research assessment exercises,
such as in the United Kingdom.
