Revisiting size effects in higher education research productivity

The potential occurrence of variable returns to size in research activity is a factor to be considered in choices about the size of research organizations and also in the planning of national research assessment exercises, so as to avoid favoring those organizations that would benefit from such occurrence. The aim of the current work is to improve on weaknesses in past inquiries concerning returns to size through application of a research productivity measurement methodology that is more accurate and robust. The method involves field-standardized measurements that are free of the typical distortions of aggregate measurement by discipline or organization. The analysis is conducted for 183 hard science fields in all 77 Italian universities (time period 2004-2008) and allows detection of potential differences by field

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

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

Funnel plots for visualizing uncertainty in the research performance of institutions

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 work we focus on the evaluation of research institutions on the basis of average individual performance, where uncertainty is inversely related to the number of research staff. We utilize the funnel plot, a tool originally developed in meta-analysis, to measure and visualize the uncertainty in the performance values of research institutions. As an illustrative example, we apply the funnel plot to represent the uncertainty in the assessed research performance for Italian universities active in biochemistryComment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1810.1266

The ratio of top scientists to the academic staff as an indicator of the competitive strength of universities

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 competitive strength of the universities. This work identifies the Italian top scientists in over 200 fields, by their research productivity. It then ranks the relative universities by the ratio of top scientists to overall faculty. Finally, it contrasts this list with the ranking list by average productivity of the overall faculty. The analysis is carried out at the field, discipline, and overall university levels. The paper also explores the secondary question of whether the ratio of top scientists to faculty is related to the size of the university

From rankings to funnel plots: the question of accounting for uncertainty when measuring university research 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 university level. The findings reveal that for most universities the citation-based indicator used gives insufficient statistical evidence to infer that their research productivity is inferior or superior to the average. This general observation is one that we could indeed expect in a higher education system that is essentially non-competitive. The question is whether the introduction of uncertainty in performance reporting, while technically sound, could weaken institutional motivation to work towards continuous improvement

A methodology to compute the territorial productivity of scientists: The case of Italy

Policy-makers working at the national and regional levels could find the territorial mapping of research productivity by field to be useful in informing both research and industrial policy. Research-based private companies could also use such mapping for efficient selection in localizing R&D activities and university research collaborations. In this work we apply a bibliometric methodology for ranking by research productivity: i) the fields of research for each territory (region and province); and ii) the territories for each scientific field. The analysis is based on the 2008-2012 scientific output indexed in the Web of Science, by all professors on staff at Italian universities. The population is over 36,000 professors, active in 192 fields and 9 disciplines

Ranking research institutions by the number of highly-cited articles per scientist

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 efficiency. In the current work we propose an indicator of efficiency, the number of HCAs per scientist, which can complement the productivity indicators based on impact of total output. We apply this indicator to measure excellence in the research of Italian universities as a whole, and in each field and discipline of the hard sciences

Should the research performance of scientists be distinguished by gender?

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 worthwhile to verify if comparing the performance within each gender, rather than without distinction, gives significantly different ranking lists. If there were some structural factor that determined a penalty in performance of female researchers compared to their male peers, then under conditions of equal capacities of men and women, any comparative evaluations of individual performance that fail to account for gender differences would lead to distortion of the judgments in favor of men. In this work we measure the extent of differences in rank between the two methods of comparing performance in each field of the hard sciences: for professors in the Italian university system, we compare the distributions of research performance for men and women and subsequently the ranking lists with and without distinction by gender. The results are of interest for the optimization of efficient selection in formulation of recruitment, career advancement and incentive schemes

The spin-off of elite universities in non-competitive, undifferentiated higher education systems: an empirical simulation in Italy

Higher education systems featuring intense competition have developed world-class universities, capable of attracting top professors and students and considerable public-private funding. This does not occur in non-competitive systems, where highly-talented faculty and students are dispersed across all institutions. In such systems, the authors propose the budding of spin-off universities, staffed by migration of top scientists from the entire public research system. This work illustrate the proposal through an example: the spin-off of a new university in Rome-Italy staffed with the best professors from the three current public city universities. Such a faculty would offer top national research productivity, a magnet to attract the other critical ingredients of a world-class university: talented students, abundant resources and visionary governance