Correlations between bibliometrics and peer evaluation for all disciplines: the evaluation of Brazilian scientists

This paper correlates the peer evaluations performed in late 2009 by the disciplinary committees of CNPq (a Brazilian funding agency) with some standard bibliometric measures for 55 scientific areas. We compared the decisions to increase, maintain or decrease a scientist’s research scholarship funded by CNPq. We analyzed these decisions for 2,663 Brazilian scientists and computed their correlations (Spearman rho) with 21 different measures, among them: total production, production in the last 5 years, production indexed in Web of Science and Scopus, total citations received (according to WOS, Scopus, and Google Scholar), h-index and m-quotient (according to the three citation services). The highest correlations for each area range from 0.95 to 0.29, although there are areas with no significantly positive correlation with any of the metrics.