35 research outputs found
National-scale research performance assessment at the individual level
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 macroeconomic aims could be compromised if internal
redistribution of government resources within each research institution does
not follow a consistent logic: the intended effects of national evaluation
systems can result only if a "funds for quality" rule is followed at all levels
of decision-making. The objective of this study is to propose a bibliometric
methodology for: i) large-scale comparative evaluation of research performance
by individual scientists, research groups and departments within research
institution, to inform selective funding allocations, and ii) assessment of
strengths and weaknesses by field of research, to inform strategic planning and
control. The proposed methodology has been applied to the hard science
disciplines of the Italian university research system for the period 2004-2006
Efficiency of research performance and the glass researcher
Abramo and D'Angelo (in press) doubt the validity of established
size-independent indicators measuring citation impact and plead in favor of
measuring scientific efficiency (by using the Fractional Scientific Strength
indicator). This note is intended to comment on some questionable and a few
favorable approaches in the paper by Abramo and D'Angelo (in press).Comment: Accepted for publication in the Journal of Informetric
A farewell to the MNCS and like size-independent indicators
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 distortions when rankings by MNCS are compared to those based on indicators
of productivity. The authors propose recommendations for the scientometric
community to switch to ranking by research efficiency, instead of MNCS and
other size-independent indicators
National research assessment exercises: the effects of changing the rules of the game during the game
National research evaluation exercises provide a comparative measure of
research performance of the nation's institutions, and as such represent a tool
for stimulating research productivity, particularly if the results are used to
inform selective funding by government. While a school of thought welcomes
frequent changes in evaluation criteria in order to prevent the subjects
evaluated from adopting opportunistic behaviors, it is evident that the "rules
of the game" should above all be functional towards policy objectives, and
therefore be known with adequate forewarning prior to the evaluation period.
Otherwise, the risk is that policy-makers will find themselves faced by a
dilemma: should they reward universities that responded best to the criteria in
effect at the outset of the observation period or those that result as best
according to rules that emerged during or after the observation period? This
study verifies if and to what extent some universities are penalized instead of
rewarded for good behavior, in pursuit of the objectives of the "known" rules
of the game, by comparing the research performances of Italian universities for
the period of the nation's next evaluation exercise (2004-2008): first as
measured according to criteria available at the outset of the period and next
according to those announced at the end of the period
What is the appropriate length of the publication period over which to assess research performance?
National research assessment exercises are conducted in different nations
over varying periods. The choice of the publication period to be observed has
to address often contrasting needs: it has to ensure the reliability of the
results issuing from the evaluation, but also reach the achievement of frequent
assessments. In this work we attempt to identify which is the most appropriate
or optimal publication period to be observed. For this, we analyze the
variation of individual researchers' productivity rankings with the length of
the publication period within the period 2003-2008, by the over 30,000 Italian
university scientists in the hard sciences. First we analyze the variation in
rankings referring to pairs of contiguous and overlapping publication periods,
and show that the variations reduce markedly with periods above three years.
Then we will show the strong randomness of performance rankings over
publication periods under three years. We conclude that the choice of a three
year publication period would seem reliable, particularly for physics,
chemistry, biology and medicine
The impact of unproductive and top researchers on overall university research performance
Unlike competitive higher education systems, non-competitive systems show
relatively uniform distributions of top professors and low performers among
universities. In this study, we examine the impact of unproductive and top
faculty members on overall research performance of the university they belong
to. Furthermore, we analyze the potential relationship between research
productivity of a university and the indexes of concentration of unproductive
and top professors. Research performance is evaluated using a bibliometric
approach, through publications indexed on the Web of Science between 2004 and
2008. The set analyzed consists of all Italian universities active in the hard
sciences.Comment: arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1810.13234,
arXiv:1810.13233, arXiv:arXiv:1810.13231, arXiv:1810.13281, arXiv:1810.1220
Research productivity: are higher academic ranks more productive than lower ones?
This work analyses the links between individual research performance and
academic rank. A typical bibliometric methodology is used to study the
performance of all Italian university researchers active in the hard sciences,
for the period 2004-2008. The objective is to characterize the performance of
the ranks of full, associate and assistant professors, along various
dimensions, in order to verify the existence of performance differences among
the ranks in general and for single disciplines
The dangers of performance-based research funding in non-competitive higher education systems
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 among all the universities, rather than concentrated
among a few, there is a high risk of penalizing those top scientists who work
in lower-performance universities. Using a five-year bibliometric analysis
conducted on all Italian universities active in the hard sciences from
2004-2008, this work analyzes the distribution of publications and relevant
citations by scientists within the universities, measures the research
performance of individual scientists, quantifies the intensity of concentration
of top scientists at each university, provides performance rankings for the
universities, and indicates the effects of selective funding on the top
scientists of low-ranked universities
Relatives in the same university faculty: nepotism or merit?
In many countries culture, practice or regulations inhibit the co-presence of
relatives within the university faculty. We test the legitimacy of such
attitudes and provisions, investigating the phenomenon of nepotism in Italy, a
nation with high rates of favoritism. We compare the individual research
performance of "children" who have "parents" in the same university against
that of the "non-children" with the same academic rank and seniority, in the
same field. The results show non-significant differences in performance.
Analyses of career advancement show that children's research performance is on
average superior to that of their colleagues who did not advance. The study's
findings do not rule out the existence of nepotism, which has been actually
recorded in a low percentage of cases, but do not prove either the most serious
presumed consequences of nepotism, namely that relatives who are poor
performers are getting ahead of non-relatives who are better performers. In
light of these results, many attitudes and norms concerning parental ties in
academia should be reconsidered.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1810.12207,
arXiv:1810.1323
A sensitivity analysis of researchers' productivity rankings to the time of citation observation
In this work we investigate the sensitivity of individual researchers'
productivity rankings to the time of citation observation. The analysis is
based on observation of research products for the 2001-2003 triennium for all
research staff of Italian universities in the hard sciences, with the year of
citation observation varying from 2004 to 2008. The 2008 rankings list is
assumed the most accurate, as citations have had the longest time to accumulate
and thus represent the best possible proxy of impact. By comparing the rankings
lists from each year against the 2008 benchmark we provide policy-makers and
research organization managers a measure of trade-off between timeliness of
evaluation execution and accuracy of performance rankings. The results show
that with variation in the evaluation citation window there are variable rates
of inaccuracy across the disciplines of researchers. The inaccuracy results
negligible for Physics, Biology and Medicine