Digital Libraries
This work examines whether the macroeconomic divide between northern and southern Italy is also present at the level of higher education. The analysis confirms that the research performance in the sciences of the professors in the south is…
This work explores the distribution of citations for the publications of top scientists. A first objective is to find out whether the 80-20 Pareto rule applies, that is if 80% of the citations to a top scientist's work concern 20% of their…
The prediction of the long-term impact of a scientific article is challenging task, addressed by the bibliometrician through resorting to a proxy whose reliability increases with the breadth of the citation window. In the national research…
Prior investigations have offered contrasting results on a troubling question: whether the alphabetical ordering of bylines confers citation advantages on those authors whose surnames put them first in the list. The previous studies…
We investigate the question of how long top scientists retain their stardom. We observe the research performance of all Italian professors in the sciences over three consecutive four-year periods, between 2001 and 2012. The top scientists…
The present paper takes its place in the stream of studies that analyze the effect of interdisciplinarity on the impact of research output. Unlike previous studies, in this study the interdisciplinarity of the publications is not inferred…
The response by Benedetto, Checchi, Graziosi & Malgarini (2017) (hereafter "BCG&M"), past and current members of the Italian Agency for Evaluation of University and Research Systems (ANVUR), to Franceschini and Maisano's ("F&M") article…
This work provides an in-depth analysis of the relation between the different types of collaboration and research productivity, showing how both are influenced by some personal and organizational variables. By applying different…
In this work we analyze the combined effects of gender, age and academic rank on the propensity of individual scholars to diversify their scientific activity. The aspect of research diversification is measured along three main dimensions,…
When a publication is cited it generates a benefit. Through the country affiliations of the citing authors, it is possible to work upwards, tracing the countries that benefit from results produced in a national research system. In this work…
This work verifies whether research diversification by a scientist is in some measure related to their collaboration with multidisciplinary teams. The analysis considers the publications achieved by 5300 Italian academics in the sciences…
The paper provides an empirical examination of how research productivity distributions differ across scientific fields and disciplines. Productivity is measured using the FSS indicator, which embeds both quantity and impact of output. The…
In this work we investigate the determinants of professors' career advancement in Italian universities. From the analyses, it emerges that the fundamental determinant of an academic candidate's success is not scientific merit, but rather…
Web archiving is the process of collecting portions of the Web to ensure that the information is preserved for future exploitation. However, despite the increasing number of web archives worldwide, the absence of efficient and meaningful…
A scientist may publish tens or hundreds of papers over a career, but these contributions are not evenly spaced in time. Sixty years of studies on career productivity patterns in a variety of fields suggest an intuitive and universal…
Academic papers have been the protagonists in disseminating expertise. Naturally, paper citation pattern analysis is an efficient and essential way of investigating the knowledge structure of science and technology. For decades, it has been…
The Shannon-Weaver model of linear information transmission is extended with two loops potentially generating redundancies: (i) meaning is provided locally to the information from the perspective of hindsight, and (ii) meanings can be…
The rapid rise of international collaboration over the past three decades, demonstrated in coauthorship of scientific articles, raises the question of whether countries benefit from cooperative science and how this might be measured. We…
In a recent paper, Hirsch (2018) proposes to attribute the credit for a co-authored paper to the {\alpha}-author--the author with the highest h-index--regardless of his or her actual contribution, effectively reducing the role of the other…
The Leiden Rankings can be used for grouping research universities by considering universities which are not statistically significantly different as homogeneous sets. The groups and intergroup relations can be analyzed and visualized using…