On tit for tat: Franceschini and Maisano versus ANVUR regarding the Italian research assessment exercise VQR 2011-2014

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 (2017), inevitably draws us into the debate. BCG&M in fact complain "that almost all criticisms to the evaluation procedures adopted in the two Italian research assessments VQR 2004-2010 and 2011-2014 limit themselves to criticize the procedures without proposing anything new and more apt to the scope". Since it is us who raised most criticisms in the literature, we welcome this opportunity to retrace our vainly "constructive" recommendations, made with the hope of contributing to assessments of the Italian research system more in line with the state of the art in scientometrics. We see it as equally interesting to confront the problem of the failure of knowledge transfer from R&D (scholars) to engineering and production (ANVUR's practitioners) in the Italian VQRs. We will provide a few notes to help the reader understand the context for this failure. We hope that these, together with our more specific comments, will also assist in communicating the reasons for the level of scientometric competence expressed in BCG&M's heated response to F&M's criticism

Rivals for the crown: Reply to Opthof and Leydesdorff

We reply to the criticism of Opthof and Leydesdorff [arXiv:1002.2769] on the way in which our institute applies journal and field normalizations to citation counts. We point out why we believe most of the criticism is unjustified, but we also indicate where we think Opthof and Leydesdorff raise a valid point

The measurement of science and technology in China.

This paper introduced the background about the measurement of science and technology in China and selectively introduced the most recent statistic results released by the Institute of Scientific and Technical Information of China.China; Science and technology; Measurement;

CitNetExplorer: A new software tool for analyzing and visualizing citation networks

We present CitNetExplorer, a new software tool for analyzing and visualizing citation networks of scientific publications. CitNetExplorer can for instance be used to study the development of a research field, to delineate the literature on a research topic, and to support literature reviewing. We first introduce the main concepts that need to be understood when working with CitNetExplorer. We then demonstrate CitNetExplorer by using the tool to analyze the scientometric literature and the literature on community detection in networks. Finally, we discuss some technical details on the construction, visualization, and analysis of citation networks in CitNetExplorer

Fundamentals of the strategic analysis of the information

If the organizations, in the current information society, intend to be competitive, cannot be exposed to the risk of ignorance. But if they aim for continuity in their progress, they cannot be exposed at an external, extreme and continued pressure either, because this would burst the organization with too much information without the filters that sort its significance. The key for the organizations is not the information, but the flow of selected and treated information that these are capable of assimilating and that is useful for them to design their strategy. In front of this righteous requirement, Competitive Intelligence (CI) is defined as the systematic process of retrieval, treatment, analysis, representation, interpretation, and diffusion of the information about industry and the competitors, all with the final objective of giving support to the decision making process. CI represents an organizational function with huge strategic value

Citation Statistics from 110 Years of Physical Review

Publicly available data reveal long-term systematic features about citation statistics and how papers are referenced. The data also tell fascinating citation histories of individual articles.Comment: This is esssentially identical to the article that appeared in the June 2005 issue of Physics Toda