Benchmarking some Portuguese S&T system research units

The increasing use of citation impact metrics for evaluation and comparison not only of individual researchers but also of institutions, universities and even countries has prompted the development of bibliometrics. Currently, these metrics are becoming widely accepted as an easy and balanced way to compare and rank scientists and/or research units. This paper presents a benchmarking study of a selected list of representative Portuguese research units based on bibliometric parameters, number of projects and number of PhD produced. The study aimed at comparing the productivity and impact of the selected research units using objective metrics based on public and official information, retrievable online and thus verifiable and repeatable. The study focused on the 2003-06 period, in which an official evaluation was conducted. The main advantage of our study was the application of automatic tools, which enable us to extend and update the results with minimal human intervention. Moreover, the results show that the parameters chosen for this study perform quite well, since they provided a good match to the official evaluation results, which demonstrates the feasibility of applying such approach in a research unit evaluation setting.