The objectivity of national research foundation peer review in South Africa assessed against bibliometric indexes

This paper examines the strength of association between the outcomes of National Research Foundation (NRF) peer review based rating mechanisms, and a range of objective measures of performance of researchers. The analysis is conducted on 1932 scholars that have received an NRF rating or an NRF research chair. We find that on average scholars with higher NRF ratings record higher performance against research output and impact metrics. However, we...