Citation counts are widely used as indicators of research quality to support or replace human peer review and for lists of top cited papers, researchers, and institutions. Nevertheless, the relationship between citations and research quality is poorly evidenced. We report the first large-scale science-wide academic evaluation of the relationship between research quality and citations (field normalised citation counts), correlating them for 87,739 journal articles in 34 field-based UK Units of Assessment (UoAs). The two correlate positively in all academic fields, from very weak (0.1) to strong (0.5), reflecting broadly linear relationships in all fields. We give the first evidence that the correlations are positive even across the arts and humanities. The patterns are similar for the field classification schemes of Scopus and Dimensions.ai, although varying for some individual subjects and therefore more uncertain for these. We also show for the first time that no field has a citation threshold beyond which all articles are excellent quality, so lists of top cited articles are not pure collections of excellence, and neither is any top citation percentile indicator. Thus, whilst appropriately field normalised citations associate positively with research quality in all fields, they never perfectly reflect it, even at high values.

翻译：引文计数被广泛用作研究质量的指标，以支持或替代人类同行评审，并用于高被引论文、研究人员和机构的名单。然而，引文与研究质量之间的关系缺乏充分证据。我们首次开展了大规模、全学科范围的学术评价，研究了研究质量与引文（领域归一化引文计数）之间的关系，对英国34个基于领域的评估单元（UoAs）中的87,739篇期刊文章进行了相关性分析。结果表明，在所有学术领域中，两者均呈正相关，相关系数从极弱（0.1）到强（0.5）不等，反映了各领域大致线性的关系。我们首次提供了证据，表明即使在艺术与人文学科中，这种相关性也是正的。对于Scopus和Dimensions.ai的领域分类方案，其模式相似，但在某些具体学科上存在差异，因此对这些学科的结果确定性更低。我们还首次证明，没有任何领域存在一个引文阈值，超过该阈值的所有文章均为高质量，因此高被引文章列表并非纯粹的卓越集合，任何高被引百分位数指标也是如此。因此，尽管适当地进行领域归一化后的引文在所有领域中都与研究质量正相关，但它们从未完全反映研究质量，即便在高引文值下也是如此。