Predicting results of the Research Excellence Framework using departmental h-index

We compare estimates for past institutional research performances coming from two bibliometric indicators to the results of the UK’s Research Assessment Exercise which last took place in 2008. We demonstrate that a version of the departmental h-index is better correlated with the actual results of that peer-review exercise than a competing metric known as the normalised citation-based indicator. We then determine the corresponding h-indices for 2008–2013, the period examined in the UK’s Research Excellence Framework (REF) 2014. We place herewith the resulting predictions on the arXiv in advance of the REF results being published (December 2014). These may be considered as unbiased predictions of relative performances in that exercise. We will revisit this paper after the REF results are available and comment on the reliability or otherwise of these bibliometrics as compared with peer review.