“...I picked based on my own non-systematic judgment...” is a pretty big caveat for deciding what makes something good. If his judgement is biased toward being

“...I picked based on my own non-systematic judgment...” is a pretty big caveat for deciding what makes something good. If his judgement is biased toward being impressed by quality X of a group, then sure enough the study will conclude that quality X is important. However, any objective measure of research group effectiveness is probably worse. You sometimes see them ranked by number of papers published, or number of patents filed, which is definitely the wrong criterion. Whereas the author’s judgement is probably mostly aligned with what you or I might value. It’s better to be subjectively right than objectively wrong.