Abstract In the evaluation of research performance of Higher Education Institutions (HEIs), institutional benchmarking has been proposed as better alternative to rankings since the focal institution is compared with HEIs similar for some core characteristics. The literature advocates an hybrid approach to peer selection, where, first, potential peers are identified based on quantitative data and, second, experts make the final selection based on in-depth knowledge of the institution and of the purpose of the comparison. However, for what concerns subject composition, a fundamental characteristic differentiating HEIs, there is no systematic methodology to operationalize this strategy. In this paper, we address this gap by mobilizing two sources of quantitative data on HEIs’ subject profiles, i.e. the distribution of students by fields of education and the journal subject distribution of scholarly publications. We compare these two distributions on a large sample of European HEIs derived from the European Tertiary Education Register enriched with data from the SCImago Institutions Ranking. The comparative analyses highlight that the two distributions are largely complementary and that a combined index yields good results to identify potential peers for focal institutions. An in-depth investigation of exemplary HEIs shows that, given the complexity of the HEIs’ landscape, quantitative methods can only suggest potential peers in a first step that should be checked by experts based on more specific information in a second step.
Lepori et al. (Thu,) studied this question.