Is there a role for novel citation measures for the social sciences and humanities in a national research assessment exercise?

Australia is about to move to a new system of distributing government block grants for research among universities, with the introduction of a process similar to Britain's Research Assessment Exercise. In the Australian model, peer judgements will be informed by quantitative performance measures, including citation analysis. However, standard bibliometric measures are widely acknowledged to be inappropriate for most disciplines in the social sciences and humanities. In an attempt to identify a more suitable alternative, two recently completed pilot studies have trialled new approaches to bibliometrics, testing their applicability for the assessment of research in political science and history. The new methodology, which extended citation data to included citations to books, book chapters and journals outside the citation databases, was endorsed at discipline workshops by senior academics from the two disciplines. They found that this new approach to bibliometrics could be a valuable tool for both disciplines, with some caveats attached. The chief reservation related to the role of quantitative measures - there was consensus that they should be used to inform peer review, rather than drive the assessment process.