Battle of the beauty contests

Does the analysis of the citation of publications of research adequately measure the impact or worth of the research reported upon? Does the percentile rank assigned to an investigator initiated research proposal by a group of her peers reflect the likelihood of societal or scientific impact of the proposed research plan? If the answer to both questions is yes then this recent study in Circulation Research will puzzle. There was very little relationship between citations and the percentile rank of the proposal. Except for the highest ranked proposals which did have a large bump in citations. Of course there are other ways to decide to fund research that also have their own measures of success.

So how best to have a public debate about how we allocate the public monies for biomedical research?
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Hat tip: David Osterbur.