As an outsider with a researcher PhD in the family, I suspect its an issue of how the institutions measure success. How many papers? How many cites? Other metrics might work, but probably not as broadly. I assume they will also care about the size of your staff, how much grant money you get, patents held, etc.
I suspect that, short of a Nobel prize, it is difficult to objectively measure how one is advancing scientific progress (without a PhD committee to evaluate it.)