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

Does your surname affect the citability of your publications?

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 analyzed the surname effect at publication level, i.e. whether papers with the first author early in the alphabet trigger more citations than papers with a first author late in the alphabet. We adopt instead a different approach, by analyzing the surname effect on citability at the individual level, i.e. whether authors with alphabetically earlier surnames result as being more cited. Examining the question at both the overall and discipline levels, the analysis finds no evidence whatsoever that alphabetically earlier surnames gain advantage. The same lack of evidence occurs for the subpopulation of scientists with very high publication rates, where alphabetical advantage might gain more ground. The field of observation consists of 14,467 scientists in the sciences