arXiv subjects

Alberto Baccini

Publications and source records attributed to Alberto Baccini.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Self-referentiality and asymmetric knowledge flows between journals. The case of economics

This paper investigates the evolution of self-referentiality and knowledge flows in economics journals before and after the 2008 financial crisis. Using a multi-level approach, we analyze patterns at the discipline, cluster, and journal levels, combining citational measures with a classification of journals based on intellectual similarity and social proximity. At the aggregate level, results suggest a general decline in self-referentiality, indicating increased openness across the discipline. However, this trend conceals substantial heterogeneity. At finer levels of analysis, two clusters - CORE and Finance - emerge as persistent outliers, exhibiting very high levels of self-referentiality. While Finance experienced a gradual reduction over time, the CORE shows increasing closure. By examining reference asymmetries, we uncover a hierarchical structure of knowledge flows. The CORE operates as a central hub and net exporter of knowledge to all other clusters, particularly to the traditional core fields of economics, whereas Finance acts as a net exporter only within its own domain and remains dependent on the CORE. These asymmetries are reinforced at the level of individual journals, where a small set of top journals occupies the apex of a hierarchically ordered system of knowledge transmission. We argue that these patterns reflect the interplay between intellectual dynamics and organizational structures, particularly the role of editorial networks in shaping access to publication and visibility. The findings suggest that, following the financial crisis, economics has experienced a process of increasing epistemic and organizational closure at its core, alongside greater openness in peripheral areas. This dual dynamic raises questions about the representativeness of top journals and the evolving structure of the discipline.

econ.GN↗

arXiv2026

A Stock-Flow Framework for Editorial Board Dynamics: The Case of Economics Journals, 1866-2019

Research on the editorial boards of scholarly journals has predominantly relied on static, cross-sectional data, focusing on their composition or interlocking editorships at single points in time. To address this gap, a formal stock-flow framework is developed for analyzing the longitudinal dynamics of editorial boards. The model integrates three interconnected layers: journal demographics, the dynamics of editorial positions, and the dynamics of board members. This framework is applied to the Gatekeepers of Economics Longitudinal Database (GOELD), which contains annual snapshots of editorial boards for approximately 1,700 economics journals from 1866 to 2006 (by decade), plus the years 2012 and 2019. The period until 1946 was characterized by small-scale: few journals and compact editorial communities. The decade from 1946 to 1956 marked the shift toward a ''big science'' model, initiating an era of expansionary growth fueled primarily by the founding of new journals. The contemporary period (2006-2019) appears to represent a structural break, characterized by low flux and more stable and more closed editorial communities. The results shows that the proposed framework enables a dynamic, long-term analysis of how journals and their gatekeeping systems evolve, grow, and structure themselves.

cs.DL↗

arXiv2025

Edgeworth's exact and naturally weighted evolutionary utilitarianism and the happiness of Mr. Pongo

This article challenges the conventional reading of Francis Ysidro Edgeworth by reconstructing his intellectual project of unifying the moral sciences through mathematics. The contribution he made in the first phase of his writing, culminating in \textit{Mathematical Psychics}, aimed to reconfigure utilitarianism as an exact science, grounding it in psychophysics and evolutionary biology. In order to solve the utilitarian problem of maximizing pleasure for a given set of sentient beings, he modeled individuals as ``quasi-Fechnerian'' functions, which incorporated their capacity for pleasure as determined by their place in the evolutionary order. The problem of maximization is solved by distributing means according to the individuals' capacity for pleasure. His radical anti-egalitarian conclusions did not stem from an abstract principle of justice, but from the necessity to maximize welfare among naturally unequal beings. This logic was applied not only to sentients of different evolutionary orders, such as Mr. Pongo, a famous gorilla, and humans, but also to human races, sexes, and classes. The system, in essence, uses the apparent neutrality of science to naturalize and justify pre-existing social hierarchies. This analysis reveals that the subsequent surgical removal of his utilitarianism by economists, starting with Schumpeter, while making his tools palatable, eviscerates his overarching philosophical system.

econ.GN↗

arXiv2025

Exploring the Shape of Economics: A Multilayer Network Analysis of Social Communities and Intellectual Similarity Among Journals Before and After the 2008 Financial Crisis

This paper develops a multilayer network approach for exploring the evolution of scientific disciplines, using the case of economics before and after the 2008 global financial crisis as a large-scale empirical testing ground. The units of analysis are journals, linked by social and intellectual relationships. The analysis covers all journals indexed in EconLit across three years (2006, 2012 and 2019). In the most recent year (2019), the dataset includes 909 journals, over 30,000 editorial board members, more than 260,000 authors, 134,000 articles, and nearly 2 million cited references. For each period, we model journals as connected in a four-layer multiplex network: the social relationships are based on shared editors (interlocking editorship) and shared authors (interlocking authorship), while the intellectual ones are based on shared references (bibliographic coupling) and textual similarity between articles. These four layers are integrated using Similarity Network Fusion to produce unified similarity networks from which journal communities are identified. Comparing the field across the three periods reveals a high degree of structural continuity. Although research topics changed after the crisis, the fundamental social and intellectual relationships among journals remained remarkably stable. A major result of the analysis is that editorial networks play the dominant role in shaping hierarchies and legitimize knowledge production within the discipline. Whether this finding holds in other scientific disciplines remains an open question for future research.

econ.GN↗

arXiv2024

COARA will not save science from the tyranny of administrative evaluation

The Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment (CoARA) agreement is a cornerstone in the ongoing efforts to reform research evaluation. CoARA advocates for administrative evaluations of research that rely on peer review, supported by responsible metrics, as beneficial for both science and society. Its principles can be critically examined through the lens of Philip Kitcher's concept of well-ordered science in a democratic society. From Kitcher's perspective, CoARA's approach faces two significant challenges: definitions of quality and impact are determined by governments or evaluation institutions rather than emerging from broad public deliberation, and a select group of scientists is empowered to assess research based on these predefined criteria. This creates susceptibility to both the ''tyranny of expertise'' and the ''tyranny of ignorance'' that Kitcher cautions against. Achieving Kitcher's ideal would require limiting administrative evaluations to essential tasks, such as researcher recruitment and project funding, while establishing procedures grounded in principles of fairness.

cs.DL↗

arXiv2024

Is the panel fair? Evaluating panel compositions through network analysis. The case of research assessments in Italy

Research evaluation is usually governed by panels of peers. Procedural fairness refers to the principles that ensures decisions are made through a fair and transparent process. It requires that the composition of panels is fair. A fair panel is usually defined in terms of observable characteristics of scholars such as gender or affiliations. The formal adherence to these criteria is not sufficient to guarantee a fair composition in terms of scholarly thinking, background, or policy orientation. An empirical strategy for exploring the fairness in the intellectual composition of panels is proposed, based on the observation of links between panellists. The case study regards the three panels selected to evaluate research in economics, statistics and business during the Italian research assessment exercises. The first two panels were appointed directly by the governmental agency responsible for the evaluation, while the third was randomly selected. Hence the third panel can be considered as a control for evaluating about the fairness of the others. The fair representation is explored by comparing the networks of panellists based on their co-authorship relations, the networks based on journals in which they published and the networks based on their affiliated institutions (universities, research centres and newspapers). The results show that the members of the first two panels had connections much higher than the members of the control group. Hence the composition of the first two panels should be considered as unfair, as the results of the research assessments.

econ.GN↗

arXiv2023

Fine-grained classification of journal articles by relying on multiple layers of information through similarity network fusion: the case of the Cambridge Journal of Economics

In order to explore the suitability of a fine-grained classification of journal articles by exploiting multiple sources of information, articles are organized in a two-layer multiplex. The first layer conveys similarities based on the full-text of articles, and the second similarities based on cited references. The information of the two layers are only weakly associated. The Similarity Network Fusion process is adopted to combine the two layers into a new single-layer network. A clustering algorithm is applied to the fused network and the classification of articles is obtained. In order to evaluate its coherence, this classification is compared with the ones obtained by applying the same algorithm to each of two layers. Moreover, the classification obtained for the fused network is also compared with the classifications obtained when the layers of information are integrated using different methods available in literature. In the case of the Cambridge Journal of Economics, Similarity Network Fusion appears to be the best option. Moreover, the achieved classification appears to be fine-grained enough to represent the extreme heterogeneity characterizing the contributions published in the journal.

cs.DL↗

arXiv2023

Who are the gatekeepers of economics? Geographic diversity, gender composition, and interlocking editorship of journal boards

This study investigates the role of editorial board members as gatekeepers in science, creating and utilizing a database of 1,516 active economics journals in 2019, which includes more than 44,000 scholars from over 6,000 institutions and 142 countries. The composition of these editorial boards is explored in terms of geographic affiliation, institutional affiliation, and gender. Results highlight that the academic publishing environment is primarily governed by men affiliated with elite universities in the United States. The study further explores social similarities among journals using a network analysis perspective based on interlocking editorship. Comparison of networks generated by all scholars, editorial leaders, and non-editorial leaders reveals significant structural similarities and associations among clusters of journals. These results indicate that links between pairs of journals tend to be redundant, and this can be interpreted in terms of social and intellectual homophily within each board, and between boards of journals belonging to the same cluster. Finally, the analysis of the most central journals and scholars in the networks suggests that journals probably adopt 'strategic decisions' in the selection of the editorial board members. The documented high concentration of editorial power poses a serious risk to innovative research in economics.

econ.GN↗

arXiv2023

A global exploratory comparison of country self-citations 1996-2019

Self-citations are a key topic in evaluative bibliometrics because they can artificially inflate citation-related performance indicators. Recently, self-citations defined at the largest scale, i.e., country self-citations, have started to attract the attention of researchers and policymakers. According to a recent research, in fact, the anomalous trends in the country self-citation rates of some countries, such as Italy, have been induced by the distorting effect of citation metrics-centered science policies. In the present study, we investigate the trends of country self-citations in 50 countries over the world in the period 1996-2019 using Scopus data. Results show that for most countries country self-citations have decreased over time. 12 countries (Colombia, Egypt, Indonesia, Iran, Italy, Malaysia, Pakistan, Romania, Russian Federation, Saudi Arabia, Thailand, and Ukraine), however, exhibit different behavior, with anomalous trends of self-citations. We argue that these anomalies should be attributed to the aggressive science policies adopted by these countries in recent years, which are all characterized by direct or indirect incentives for citations. Our analysis confirms that when bibliometric indicators are integrated into systems of incentives, they are capable of affecting rapidly and visibly the citation behavior of entire countries.

physics.soc-ph↗

arXiv2021

Normative versus strategic accounts of acknowledgment data: the case of the top-five journals of economics

Two alternative accounts can be given of the information contained in the acknowledgments of academic publications. According to the mainstream normative account, the acknowledgments serve to repay debts towards formal or informal collaborators. According to the strategic account, by contrast, the acknowledgments serve to increase the perceived quality of papers by associating the authors with influential scholars. The two accounts are assessed by analyzing the acknowledgments indexed in Web of Science of 1218 articles published in the "top-five journals" of economics for the years 2015-2019. The analysis is focused on six dimensions: (i) the style of acknowledging texts, (ii) the distribution of mentions, (iii) the identity of the most mentioned acknowledgees, (iv) the shares of highly and lowly mentioned acknowledgees, (v) the hierarchy of the acknowledgment network, and (vi) the correlation at a paper level between intellectual similarity, measured by common references, and social similarity, measured by common acknowledges. Results show that the normative and the strategic account should be considered as valid but partial explanations of acknowledging behavior. Hence, acknowledgments should be used with extreme caution for investigating collaboration practices and they should not be used to produce acknowledgments-based metrics of scholars for evaluative purposes.

cs.DL↗

arXiv2020

Similarity network fusion for scholarly journals

This paper explores intellectual and social proximity among scholarly journals by using network fusion techniques. Similarities among journals are initially represented by means of a three-layer network based on co-citations, common authors and common editors. The information contained in the three layers is then combined by building a fused similarity network. The fusion consists in an unsupervised process that exploits the structural properties of the layers. Subsequently, partial distance correlations are adopted for measuring the contribution of each layer to the structure of the fused network. Finally, the community morphology of the fused network is explored by using modularity. In the three fields considered (i.e. economics, information and library sciences and statistics) the major contribution to the structure of the fused network arises from editors. This result suggests that the role of editors as gatekeepers of journals is the most relevant in defining the boundaries of scholarly communities. In information and library sciences and statistics, the clusters of journals reflect sub-field specializations. In economics, clusters of journals appear to be better interpreted in terms of alternative methodological approaches. Thus, the graphs representing the clusters of journals in the fused network are powerful instruments for exploring research fields.

cs.DL↗

arXiv2019

Intellectual and social similarity among scholarly journals: an exploratory comparison of the networks of editors, authors and co-citations

This paper explores, by using suitable quantitative techniques, to what extent the intellectual proximity among scholarly journals is also a proximity in terms of social communities gathered around the journals. Three fields are considered: statistics, economics and information and library sciences. Co-citation networks (CC) represent the intellectual proximity among journals. The academic communities around the journals are represented by considering the networks of journals generated by authors writing in more than one journal (interlocking authorship: IA), and the networks generated by scholars sitting in the editorial board of more than one journal (interlocking editorship: IE). For comparing the whole structure of the networks, the dissimilarity matrices are considered. The CC, IE and IA networks appear to be correlated for the three fields. The strongest correlations is between CC and IA for the three fields. Lower and similar correlations are obtained for CC and IE, and for IE and IA. The CC, IE and IA networks are then partitioned in communities. Information and library sciences is the field where communities are more easily detectable, while the most difficult field is economics. The degrees of association among the detected communities show that they are not independent. For all the fields, the strongest association is between CC and IA networks; the minimum level of association is between IE and CC. Overall, these results indicate that the intellectual proximity is also a proximity among authors and among editors of the journals. Thus, the three maps of editorial power, intellectual proximity and authors communities tell similar stories.

cs.SI↗

arXiv2019

Citation gaming induced by bibliometric evaluation: a country-level comparative analysis

It is several years since national research evaluation systems around the globe started making use of quantitative indicators to measure the performance of researchers. Nevertheless, the effects on these systems on the behavior of the evaluated researchers are still largely unknown. We attempt to shed light on this topic by investigating how Italian researchers reacted to the introduction in 2011 of national regulations in which key passages of professional careers are governed by bibliometric indicators. A new inwardness measure, able to gauge the degree of scientific self-referentiality of a country, is defined as the proportion of citations coming from the country itself compared to the total number of citations gathered by the country. Compared to the trends of the other G10 countries in the period 2000-2016, Italy's inwardness shows a net increase after the introduction of the new evaluation rules. Indeed, globally and also for a large majority of the research fields, Italy became the European country with the highest inwardness. Possible explanations are proposed and discussed, concluding that the observed trends are strongly suggestive of a generalized strategic use of citations, both in the form of author self-citations and of citation clubs. We argue that the Italian case offers crucial insights on the constitutive effects of evaluation systems. As such, it could become a paradigmatic case in the debate about the use of indicators in science-policy contexts.

cs.DL↗

arXiv2018

On the agreement between bibliometrics and peer review: evidence from the Italian research assessment exercises

This paper appraises the concordance between bibliometrics and peer review, by drawing evidence from the data of two experiments realized by the Italian governmental agency for research evaluation. The experiments were performed for validating the dual system of evaluation, consisting in the interchangeable use of bibliometyrics and peer review, adopted by the agency in the research assessment exercises. The two experiments were based on stratified random samples of journal articles. Each article was scored by bibliometrics and by peer review. The degree of concordance between the two evaluations is then computed. The correct setting of the experiments is defined by developing the design-based estimation of the Cohen's kappa coefficient and some testing procedures for assessing the homogeneity of missing proportions between strata. The results of both experiments show that for each research areas of hard sciences, engineering and life sciences, the degree of agreement between bibliometrics and peer review is -- at most -- weak at an individual article level. Thus, the outcome of the experiments does not validate the use of the dual system of evaluation in the Italian research assessments. More in general, the very weak concordance indicates that metrics should not replace peer review at the level of individual article. Hence, the use of the dual system of evaluation for reducing costs might introduce unknown biases in a research assessment exercise.

stat.AP↗

arXiv2017

Errors and secret data in the Italian research assessment exercise. A comment to a reply

Italy adopted a performance-based system for funding universities that is centered on the results of a national research assessment exercise, realized by a governmental agency (ANVUR). ANVUR evaluated papers by using 'a dual system of evaluation', that is by informed peer review or by bibliometrics. In view of validating that system, ANVUR performed an experiment for estimating the agreement between informed review and bibliometrics. Ancaiani et al. (2015) presents the main results of the experiment. Baccini and De Nicolao (2017) documented in a letter, among other critical issues, that the statistical analysis was not realized on a random sample of articles. A reply to the letter has been published by Research Evaluation (Benedetto et al. 2017). This note highlights that in the reply there are (1) errors in data, (2) problems with 'representativeness' of the sample, (3) unverifiable claims about weights used for calculating kappas, (4) undisclosed averaging procedures; (5) a statement about 'same protocol in all areas' contradicted by official reports. Last but not least: the data used by the authors continue to be undisclosed. A general warning concludes: many recently published papers use data originating from Italian research assessment exercise. These data are not accessible to the scientific community and consequently these papers are not reproducible. They can be hardly considered as containing sound evidence at least until authors or ANVUR disclose the data necessary for replication.

cs.DL↗

arXiv2015

Do they agree? Bibliometric evaluation vs informed peer review in the Italian research assessment exercise

During the Italian research assessment exercise, the national agency ANVUR performed an experiment to assess agreement between grades attributed to journal articles by informed peer review (IR) and by bibliometrics. A sample of articles was evaluated by using both methods and agreement was analyzed by weighted Cohen's kappas. ANVUR presented results as indicating an overall 'good' or 'more than adequate' agreement. This paper re-examines the experiment results according to the available statistical guidelines for interpreting kappa values, by showing that the degree of agreement, always in the range 0.09-0.42 has to be interpreted, for all research fields, as unacceptable, poor or, in a few cases, as, at most, fair. The only notable exception, confirmed also by a statistical meta-analysis, was a moderate agreement for economics and statistics (Area 13) and its sub-fields. We show that the experiment protocol adopted in Area 13 was substantially modified with respect to all the other research fields, to the point that results for economics and statistics have to be considered as fatally flawed. The evidence of a poor agreement supports the conclusion that IR and bibliometrics do not produce similar results, and that the adoption of both methods in the Italian research assessment possibly introduced systematic and unknown biases in its final results. The conclusion reached by ANVUR must be reversed: the available evidence does not justify at all the joint use of IR and bibliometrics within the same research assessment exercise.

cs.DL↗

arXiv2013

Crossing the hurdle: the determinants of individual scientific performance

An original cross sectional dataset referring to a medium sized Italian university is implemented in order to analyze the determinants of scientific research production at individual level. The dataset includes 942 permanent researchers of various scientific sectors for a three year time span (2008 - 2010). Three different indicators - based on the number of publications or citations - are considered as response variables. The corresponding distributions are highly skewed and display an excess of zero - valued observations. In this setting, the goodness of fit of several Poisson mixture regression models are explored by assuming an extensive set of explanatory variables. As to the personal observable characteristics of the researchers, the results emphasize the age effect and the gender productivity gap, as previously documented by existing studies. Analogously, the analysis confirm that productivity is strongly affected by the publication and citation practices adopted in different scientific disciplines. The empirical evidence on the connection between teaching and research activities suggests that no univocal substitution or complementarity thesis can be claimed: a major teaching load does not affect the odds to be a non-active researcher and does not significantly reduce the number of publications for active researchers. In addition, new evidence emerges on the effect of researchers administrative tasks, which seem to be negatively related with researcher's productivity, and on the composition of departments. Researchers' productivity is apparently enhanced by operating in department filled with more administrative and technical staff, and it is not significantly affected by the composition of the department in terms of senior or junior researchers.

physics.soc-ph↗

arXiv2012

Statistical inference on the h-index with an application to top-scientist performance

Despite the huge amount of literature on h-index, few papers have been devoted to the statistical analysis of h-index when a probabilistic distribution is assumed for citation counts. The present contribution relies on showing the available inferential techniques, by providing the details for proper point and set estimation of the theoretical h-index. Moreover, some issues on simultaneous inference - aimed to produce suitable scholar comparisons - are carried out. Finally, the analysis of the citation dataset for the Nobel Laureates (in the last five years) and for the Fields medallists (from 2002 onward) is proposed.

stat.AP↗