F1000 is a post-publication peer review service for biological and medical
research. F1000 aims to recommend important publications in the biomedical
literature, and from this perspective F1000 could be an interesting tool for
research evaluation. By linking the complete database of F1000 recommendations
to the Web of Science bibliographic database, we are able to make a
comprehensive comparison between F1000 recommendations and citations. We find
that about 2% of the publications in the biomedical literature receive at least
one F1000 recommendation. Recommended publications on average receive 1.30
recommendations, and over 90% of the recommendations are given within half a
year after a publication has appeared. There turns out to be a clear
correlation between F1000 recommendations and citations. However, the
correlation is relatively weak, at least weaker than the correlation between
journal impact and citations. More research is needed to identify the main
reasons for differences between recommendations and citations in assessing the
impact of publications