Coming back to the SSHRC world, in that instance of grants, indeed a researcher would demonstrate expertise in referring to work that has been published. Certainly, there can be recognition of a very relevant journal for a particular discipline or a very good fit of having published a certain type of research in certain types of journals, so there will be that qualitative assessment, which is a reasonable assessment to make.
What gets dangerous—or perhaps a shortcut, I should say—is to look only at those publications that are right away considered highly prestigious and not to take the time to actually look for oneself, as a reviewer, at the quality of the paper that did make it into that prestigious journal. There's a notion that if you have an article in one of those journals, you must have.... That's where a peer review committee can be a little bit more of a check and balance, so that if some reviewer has a tendency to sort of say, “Oh, it was published in a prestigious journal”, others would say, “Yes, but we know the quality of it.”
That's where the DORA, the Declaration on Research Assessment, is really trying to displace that focus away from prestige, citation factors, etc. and towards the quality of the actual piece of work.