Scholarly publications evaluation is a crucial aspect in the process of measuring the quality of scientific research. It represents a vexed question at a national and international level, closely related to relevant aims such as attracting resources, gaining tenure for professionals involved in scientific projects, assessing authority and value of single institutions, and, last but not least, raising funds in the academic arena.
The main concern within universities and institutions is finding suitable criteria and common models to assess the scientific production in qualitative and quantitative terms.
The question of adopting and sharing appropriate tools to evaluate scholarly publications is currently under discussion in Italy, where there is a lack of standardization within the major organisms involved.
This study reports the description and comparison of current evaluation methodologies adopted by the Italian institutional organisms charged of major tasks in defining the organization of scientific research.
Study groups and evaluation projects have been set to collect and analyze data related to publications of scientific institutions, within relevant organizations such as 1) the Ministry of Health, 2) the Comitato di Indirizzo per la Valutazione della Ricerca (CIVR), a governmental organism aimed at establishing criteria for the evaluation of scientific research, 3) the Conferenza dei Rettori delle Università Italiane (CRUI), a leading institution in the field of academic management, 4) the National Research Council (Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, CNR), the main public organization in the field of scientific and technological research. The shared perspective of these initiatives aims at offering an unbiased method of evaluation of scientific production, taking into account the appropriate use of ISI Impact Factor and citing analysis.
A useful starting point for this evaluation process is an initiative carried out by the National Institute of Health (Istituto Superiore di Sanità, ISS) consisting in a bibliographic database which collects the works published by ISS researchers. A brief illustration of this database is given as regards the entity and type of publications issued. |