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During the Italian research assessment exercise, the national agency ANVUR performed an experiment to assess agreement between grades attributed to journal articles by informed peer review (IR) and by bibliometrics. A sample of articles was…
It has recently been claimed by Baccini and coauthors that due to ANVUR's bibliometric evaluations of individuals, departments, and universities, in Italy there has been a surge in self-citations in the last ten years, thus increasing the…
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 paper appraises the concordance between bibliometrics and peer review, by drawing evidence from the data of two experiments realized by the Italian governmental agency for research evaluation. The experiments were performed for…
The 2004-2010 VQR, completed in July 2013, was Italy's second national research assessment exercise. The VQR performance evaluation followed a pattern also seen in other nations, in being based on a selected subset of products. In this work…
This paper presents a methodology for measuring the technical efficiency of research activities. It is based on the application of data envelopment analysis to bibliometric data on the Italian university system. For that purpose, different…
We are witnessing a rapid trend towards the adoption of exercises for evaluation of national research systems, generally based on the peer review approach. They respond to two main needs: stimulating higher efficiency in research activities…
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…
The paper examines extent of bias in the performance rankings of research organisations when the assessments are based on unsupervised author-name disambiguation algorithms. It compares the outcomes of a research performance evaluation…
This paper employs data envelopment analysis (DEA) to assess both technical and cost efficiency of research activities of the Italian university system. Differently from both peer review and the top-down discipline-invariant bibliographic…
University evaluation is a topic of increasing concern in Italy as well as in other countries. In empirical analysis, university activities and performances are generally measured by means of indicator variables, summarizing the available…
Measuring the efficiency of scientific research activity presents critical methodological aspects, many of which have not been sufficiently studied. Although many studies have assessed the relation between quality and research productivity…
An increasing number of nations allocate public funds to research institutions on the basis of rankings obtained from national evaluation exercises. Therefore, in non-competitive higher education systems where top scientists are dispersed…
There is an evident and rapid trend towards the adoption of evaluation exercises for national research systems for purposes, among others, of improving allocative efficiency in public funding of individual institutions. However the desired…
In December 2003, seventeen years after the first UK research assessment exercise, Italy started up its first-ever national research evaluation, with the aim to evaluate, using the peer review method, the excellence of the national research…
There has been ample demonstration that bibliometrics is superior to peer-review for national research assessment exercises in the hard sciences. In this paper we examine the Italian case, taking the 2001-2003 university performance…
In the past decades, many countries have started to fund academic institutions based on the evaluation of their scientific performance. In this context, post-publication peer review is often used to assess scientific performance.…
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…
This study inserts in the stream of research on the perverse effects that PBRF systems can induce in the subjects evaluated. The authors' opinion is that more often than not, it is the doubtful scientific basis of the evaluation criteria…
Higher education systems in competitive environments generally present top universities, that are able to attract top scientists, top students and public and private financing, with notable socio-economic benefits in their region. The same…