For a long time, citation counts have been used to measure scientific impact or quality. Do such measures align with researchers’ assessments of the quality of their work? In this study, we address this issue by decomposing the research quality concept into constituent parts and analyzing their correspondence with citation measures. The focus is on individual publications, their citation counts and how the publications are rated by the authors themselves along quality dimensions. Overall, the study shows a statistically significant relationship for all dimensions analyzed: solidity, novelty/originality, scientific importance and societal impact. The highest correlation is found for scientific importance. However, it is not very strong, but we find distinct gradients when publications are grouped by quality scores. This means that the higher the researchers rate their work, the more they are cited. The results suggest that citation metrics have low reliability as indicators at the level of individual articles, but at aggregated levels, the validity is higher, at least according to how authors perceive quality.

In this study, we analyze the research performance of Italian and Norwegian professors using constituent components of the Fractional Scientific Strength ( FSS ) indicator. The main focus is on differences across fields in publication output and citation impact. The overall performance ( FSS ) of the two countries, which differ considerably in research size and profile, is remarkedly similar. However, an in-depth analysis shows that there are large underlying performance differences. An average Italian professor publishes more papers than a Norwegian, while the citation impact of the research output is higher for the Norwegians. In addition, at field level, the pattern varies along both dimensions, and we analyze in which fields each country has its relative strengths. Overall, this study contributes to further insights into how the research performance of different countries may be analyzed and compared to inform research policy.