The Italian National Scientific Qualification (ASN) was introduced in 2010 as part of a major reform of the national university system. Under the new regulation, the scientific qualification for a specific role (associate or full professor) and field of study is required to apply for a permanent...

The current work proposes an application of DEA methodology for measurement of technical and allocative efficiency of university research activity. The analysis is based on bibliometric data from the Italian university system for the five-year period 2004–2008. Technical and allocative...

When carrying out a research project, some materials may not be available in-house. Thus, investigators resort to external providers for conducting their research. To that end, the exchange may be formalised through material transfer agreements. In this context, industry, government and academia...

Unlike competitive higher education systems, non-competitive systems show relatively uniform distributions of top researchers 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...

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...

With the passage of more time from the original date of publication, the measure of the impact of scientific works using subsequent citation counts becomes more accurate. However the measurement of individual and organizational research productivity should ideally refer to a period with closing...

Accurate measurement of research productivity should take account of both the number of co-authors of every scientific work and of the different contributions of the individuals. For researchers in the life sciences, common practice is to indicate such contributions through position in the...

As part of its program of ‘Excellence in Research for Australia’ (ERA), the Australian Research Council ranked journals into four categories (A*, A, B, and C) in preparation for their performance evaluation of Australian universities. The ranking is important because it likely to have a...

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 does not hold true for non-competitive systems. In this...

Because of the variations in citation behavior across research fields, appropriate standardization must be applied as part of any bibliometric analysis of the productivity of individual scientists and research organizations. Such standardization involves scaling by some factor that characterizes...