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Giving kudos to bibliometric legend Henk Moed is most appropriately achieved by putting his evaluative concepts and approaches into action. The Department for Bibliometrics and Publication Strategies at the University of Vienna can meanwhile draw on rich experience with research evaluation tasks. These activities can certainly be perceived as repercussions of Henk Moed’s work. This is particularly true for his most recent book, Applied Evaluative Informetrics, which strongly supports the deliberate and correct use of bibliometric practices for evaluation purposes. In this paper, we present and discuss the lessons learned after having provided bibliometric services at the University of Vienna for more than a decade. Based on the comparison of our own insights with current practices, declarations and manifestos, we come up with new recommendations and guidelines. This also includes a discussion to what degree alternative metrics are either helpful for research assessment or rather pose a danger to the overall development of research practices. Last but not least we emphasize that bibliometric services should not exclusively be reduced to evaluative tasks. They should rather benefit (particularly young) researchers improving their publication strategies and enhancing their visibility within the research community and beyond.

This article reports on a large-scale peer-review assessment of the research done in English departments at German universities, organized by the German Wissenschaftsrat. The main aim of the paper is to take a critical look at the methodology of this research assessment project based on a detailed statistical analysis of the 4,110 ratings provided by the 19 reviewers. The focus lies on the reliability of the ratings and on the nature of the criteria that were used to assess the quality of research. The analysis shows that there is little variation across raters, which is an indication of the general reliability of the results. Most criteria highly correlate with each other. Only the criterion of ‘Transfer to non-academic addressees’ does not correlate very strongly with other indicators of research quality. The amount of external funding turns out not to be a good indicator of research quality.