At a national level, the performance at Swedish universities is evaluated using bibliometrics. A part of the research funding given to the universities from the government is distributed according to their bibliometric performance. In recent years, several Swedish universities have adopted similar systems in order to distribute funding between the different faculties at the own university according to the bibliometric performance at faculty level. The debate in media on this way of using bibliometrics indicates that scientists are negative to this quantitative method for research evaluation.
The purpose of this study was to investigate the opinions among researchers about the use of bibliometrics in research evaluation. A web-based survey has been sent out to researchers at the Faculty of Science and the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Gothenburg. In total 246 researchers from the two faculties answered the survey. The results presented here show that the opinions among the scientist are divided, but in generalare not as negative as it seems from the debate in media.