Digital Libraries
It is becoming ever more common to use bibliometric indicators to evaluate the performance of research institutions, however there is often a failure to recognize the limits and drawbacks of such indicators. Since performance measurement is…
Ever more frequently, governments have decided to implement policy measures intended to foster and reward excellence in scientific research. This is in fact the intended purpose of national research assessment exercises. These are typically…
Many nations are adopting higher education strategies that emphasize the development of elite universities able to compete at the international level in the attraction of skills and resources. Elite universities pursue excellence in all…
One of the critical issues in national research assessment exercises concerns the choice of whether to evaluate the entire scientific portfolio of the institutions or a subset composed of the best products. Under the second option, the…
National policies aimed at fostering the effectiveness of scientific systems should be based on reliable strategic analysis identifying strengths and weaknesses at field level. Approaches and indicators thus far proposed in the literature…
Productivity is the quintessential indicator of efficiency in any production system. It seems it has become a norm in bibliometrics to define research productivity as the number of publications per researcher, distinguishing it from impact.…
There is a worldwide trend towards application of bibliometric research evaluation, in support of the needs of policy makers and research administrators. However the assumptions and limitations of bibliometric measurements suggest a…
The literature on gender differences in research performance seems to suggest a gap between men and women, where the former outperform the latter. Whether one agrees with the different factors proposed to explain the phenomenon, it is…
Assessing the research performance of multi-disciplinary institutions, where scientists belong to many fields, requires that the evaluators plan how to aggregate the performance measures of the various fields. Two methods of aggregation are…
In the literature and on the Web we can readily find research excellence rankings for organizations and countries by either total number of highly-cited articles (HCAs) or by ratio of HCAs to total publications. Neither are indicators of…
Nations with non-competitive higher education systems and with high levels of corruption, are more exposed to phenomena of discrimination and favoritism in faculty recruitment. Italy is a case in point, as shown by empirical studies,…
Research performance values are not certain. Performance indexes should therefore be accompanied by uncertainty measures, to establish whether the performance of a unit is truly outstanding and not the result of random fluctuations. In this…
The literature on the theme of gender differences in research performance indicates a quite evident gap in favor of men over women. Beyond the understanding of the factors that could be at the basis of this phenomenon, it is worthwhile…
We propose a method to measure the effectiveness of the recruitment and turnover of professors, in terms of their research performance. The method presented is applied to the case of Italian universities over the period 2008-2012. The work…
The ability to attract and retain talented professors is a distinctive competence of world-class universities and a source of competitive advantage. The ratio of top scientists to academic staff could therefore be an indicator of the…
In this work we examine the relationship between research performance, age, and seniority in academic rank of full professors in the Italian academic system. Differently from a large part of the previous literature, our results generally…
The arguments presented demonstrate that the Mean Normalized Citation Score (MNCS) and other size-independent indicators based on the ratio to publications are not indicators of research performance. The article provides examples of the…
The work applies the funnel plot methodology to measure and visualize uncertainty in the research performance of Italian universities in the science disciplines. The performance assessment is carried out at both discipline and overall…
In a previous article of ours, we explained the reasons why the MNCS and all similar per-publication citation indicators should not be used to measure research performance, whereas efficiency indicators (output to input) such as the FSS are…
The objective of this research is to determine if the reference to a country in the title, keywords or abstract of a publication can influence its visibility (measured by the impact factor of the publishing journal) and citability (measured…