arXiv subjects

Flavia Di Costa

Publications and source records attributed to Flavia Di Costa.

32 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2018

The role of information asymmetry in the market for university-industry research collaboration

This study concerns the market for research collaboration between industry and universities. It presents an analysis of the population of all Italian university-industry collaborations that resulted in at least one international scientific publication between 2001 and 2003. Using spatial and bibliometric analysis relating to scientific output of university researchers, the study shows the importance of geographic proximity in companies' choices of university partner. The analysis also reveals inefficiency in the market: in a large proportion of cases private companies could have chosen more qualified research partners in universities located closer to the place of business.

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arXiv2018

Citations versus journal impact factor as proxy of quality: Could the latter ever be preferable?

In recent years bibliometricians have paid increasing attention to research evaluation methodological problems, among these being the choice of the most appropriate indicators for evaluating quality of scientific publications, and thus for evaluating the work of single scientists, research groups and entire organizations. Much literature has been devoted to analyzing the robustness of various indicators, and many works warn against the risks of using easily available and relatively simple proxies, such as journal impact factor. The present work continues this line of research, examining whether it is valid that the use of the impact factor should always be avoided in favour of citations, or whether the use of impact factor could be acceptable, even preferable, in certain circumstances. The evaluation was conducted by observing all scientific publications in the hard sciences by Italian universities, for the period 2004-2007. Performance sensitivity analyses were conducted with changing indicators of quality and years of observation.

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arXiv2018

A national-scale cross-time analysis of university research performance

Research policies in the more developed nations are ever more oriented towards the introduction of productivity incentives and competition mechanisms intended to increase efficiency in research institutions. Assessments of the effects of these policy interventions on public research activity often neglect the normal, inherent variation in the performance of research institutions over time. In this work, we propose a cross-time bibliometric analysis of research performance by all Italian universities in two consecutive periods (2001-2003 and 2004-2008) not affected by national policy interventions. Findings show that productivity and impact increased at the level of individual scientists. At the level of university, significant variation in the rank was observed.

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arXiv2018

National research assessment exercises: the effects of changing the rules of the game during the game

National research evaluation exercises provide a comparative measure of research performance of the nation's institutions, and as such represent a tool for stimulating research productivity, particularly if the results are used to inform selective funding by government. While a school of thought welcomes frequent changes in evaluation criteria in order to prevent the subjects evaluated from adopting opportunistic behaviors, it is evident that the "rules of the game" should above all be functional towards policy objectives, and therefore be known with adequate forewarning prior to the evaluation period. Otherwise, the risk is that policy-makers will find themselves faced by a dilemma: should they reward universities that responded best to the criteria in effect at the outset of the observation period or those that result as best according to rules that emerged during or after the observation period? This study verifies if and to what extent some universities are penalized instead of rewarded for good behavior, in pursuit of the objectives of the "known" rules of the game, by comparing the research performances of Italian universities for the period of the nation's next evaluation exercise (2004-2008): first as measured according to criteria available at the outset of the period and next according to those announced at the end of the period.

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arXiv2018

Research productivity: are higher academic ranks more productive than lower ones?

This work analyses the links between individual research performance and academic rank. A typical bibliometric methodology is used to study the performance of all Italian university researchers active in the hard sciences, for the period 2004-2008. The objective is to characterize the performance of the ranks of full, associate and assistant professors, along various dimensions, in order to verify the existence of performance differences among the ranks in general and for single disciplines.

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arXiv2018

National research assessment exercises: a comparison of peer review and bibliometrics rankings

Development of bibliometric techniques has reached such a level as to suggest their integration or total substitution for classic peer review in the national research assessment exercises, as far as the hard sciences are concerned. In this work we compare rankings lists of universities captured by the first Italian evaluation exercise, through peer review, with the results of bibliometric simulations. The comparison shows the great differences between peer review and bibliometric rankings for excellence and productivity.

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arXiv2018

When research assessment exercises leave room for opportunistic behavior by the subjects under evaluation

This study inserts in the stream of research on the perverse effects that PBRF systems can induce in the subjects evaluated. The authors' opinion is that more often than not, it is the doubtful scientific basis of the evaluation criteria that leave room for opportunistic behaviors. The work examines the 2004-2010 Italian national research assessment (VQR) to verify possible opportunistic behavior by universities in order to limit the penalization of their performance (and funding) due to the presence of scientifically unproductive professors in faculty. In particular, institutions may have favored "gift authorship" practices. The analysis thus focuses on the output of professors who were unproductive in the VQR publication window, but became productive ("new productives") in the following five years: a number of universities show a remarkably higher than average share of publications by new productives that are in co-authorship exclusively with colleagues from the same university.

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arXiv2018

A new approach to measure the scientific strengths of territories

The current work applies a methodology for mapping the supply of new knowledge from public research organizations, in this case from Italian institutions at the level of regions and provinces (NUTS2 and NUTS3). Through the analysis of scientific production indexed in the Web of Science for the period 2006-2010, the new knowledge is classified in subject categories and mapped according to an algorithm for the reconciliation of authors' affiliations. Unlike other studies in the literature based on simple counting of publications, the present study adopts an indicator, Scientific Strength, which takes account of both the quantity of scientific production and its impact on the advancement of knowledge. The differences in the results that arise from the two approaches are examined. The results of works of this kind can inform public research policies, at national and local levels, as well as the localization strategies of research-based companies.

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arXiv2018

Variability of research performance across disciplines within universities in non-competitive higher education systems

Many nations are adopting higher education strategies that emphasize the development of elite universities able to compete at the international level in the attraction of skills and resources. Elite universities pursue excellence in all their disciplines and fields of action. The impression is that this does not occur in "non-competitive" education systems, and that instead, within single universities excellent disciplines will coexist with mediocre ones. To test this, the authors measure research productivity in the hard sciences for all Italian universities over the period 2004-2008 at the levels of the institution, their individual disciplines and fields within them. The results show that the distribution of excellent disciplines is not concentrated in a few universities: top universities show disciplines and fields that are often mediocre, while generally mediocre universities will often include top disciplines.

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arXiv2018

Inefficiency in selecting products for submission to national research assessment exercises

One of the critical issues in national research assessment exercises concerns the choice of whether to evaluate the entire scientific portfolio of the institutions or a subset composed of the best products. Under the second option, the capacities of the institutions to select the appropriate researchers and their best products (the UK case) or simply the best products of every researcher (the Italian case) becomes critical, both for purposes of correct assessment of the real quality of research in the institutions evaluated, and for the selective funding that follows. In this work, through case studies of three Italian universities, we analyze the efficiency of the product selection that is intended to maximize the universities' scores in the current national research assessment exercise, the results of which will be the basis for assigning an important share of public financing over the coming years.

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arXiv2018

The effect of a country's name in the title of a publication on its visibility and citability

The objective of this research is to determine if the reference to a country in the title, keywords or abstract of a publication can influence its visibility (measured by the impact factor of the publishing journal) and citability (measured by the citations received). The study is based on Italian scientific production indexed in the Web of Science over the period 2004-2011. The analysis is conducted by comparing the values of four impact indicators for two subsets: i) the indexed publications with a country's name in the title, keywords or abstract; ii) the remainder of the population, with no country' name. The results obtained both at the general level and by subject category show that publications with a country name systematically receive lower impact values, with the exception of a limited number of subject categories, Also, the incidence of highly-cited articles is lower for the first subset.

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arXiv2018

Do interdisciplinary research teams deliver higher gains to science?

The present paper takes its place in the stream of studies that analyze the effect of interdisciplinarity on the impact of research output. Unlike previous studies, in this study the interdisciplinarity of the publications is not inferred through their citing or cited references, but rather by identifying the authors' designated fields of research. For this we draw on the scientific classification of Italian academics, and their publications as indexed in the WoS over a five-year period (2004-2008). We divide the publications in three subsets on the basis the nature of co-authorship: those papers coauthored with academics from different fields, which show high intensity of inter-field collaboration ("specific" collaboration, occurring in 110 pairings of fields); those papers coauthored with academics who are simply from different "non-specific" fields; and finally co-authorships within a single field. We then compare the citations of the papers and the impact factor of the publishing journals between the three subsets. The results show significant differences, generally in favor of the interdisciplinary authorships, in only one third (or slightly more) of the cases. The analysis provides the value of the median differences for each pair of publication subsets.

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arXiv2018

The effects of gender, age and academic rank on research diversification

In this work we analyze the combined effects of gender, age and academic rank on the propensity of individual scholars to diversify their scientific activity. The aspect of research diversification is measured along three main dimensions, namely its extent and intensity and the cognitive relatedness of the fields of diversification. We apply two regression models to the dataset of scientific output of all Italian professors in the sciences over the period 2004-2008. The aim is to understand how personal and organizational traits can influence individual behaviors in terms of research diversification. Among other considerations, our findings urge caution in identifying research diversification as a co-determinant of the gender productivity gap between males and females.

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arXiv2018

The effect of multidisciplinary collaborations on research diversification

This work verifies whether research diversification by a scientist is in some measure related to their collaboration with multidisciplinary teams. The analysis considers the publications achieved by 5300 Italian academics in the sciences over the period 2004-2008. The findings show that a scientist's outputs resulting from research diversification are more often than not the result of collaborations with multidisciplinary teams. The effect becomes more pronounced with larger and particularly with more diversified teams. This phenomenon is observed both at the overall level and for the disciplinary macro-areas.

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