Assessing the performance of universities by output to input indicators requires knowledge of the individual researchers working within them. Although in Italy the Ministry of University and Research updates a database of university professors, in all those countries where such databases are not available, measuring research performance is a formidable task. One possibility is to trace the research personnel of institutions indirectly through their publications, using bibliographic repertories together with author names disambiguation algorithms. This work evaluates the goodness-of-fit of the Caron and van Eck, CvE unsupervised algorithm by comparing the research performance of Italian universities resulting from its application for the derivation of the universities’ research staff, with that resulting from the supervised algorithm of D’Angelo, Giuffrida, and Abramo (2011) , which avails of input data. Results show that the CvE algorithm overestimates the size of the research staff of organizations by 56%. Nonetheless, the performance scores and ranks recorded in the two compared modes show a significant and high correlation. Still, nine out of 69 universities show rank deviations of two quartiles. Measuring the extent of distortions inherent in any evaluation exercises using unsupervised algorithms, can inform policymakers’ decisions on building national research staff databases, instead of settling for the unsupervised approaches.

In this study, we analyze the research performance of Italian and Norwegian professors using constituent components of the Fractional Scientific Strength ( FSS ) indicator. The main focus is on differences across fields in publication output and citation impact. The overall performance ( FSS ) of the two countries, which differ considerably in research size and profile, is remarkedly similar. However, an in-depth analysis shows that there are large underlying performance differences. An average Italian professor publishes more papers than a Norwegian, while the citation impact of the research output is higher for the Norwegians. In addition, at field level, the pattern varies along both dimensions, and we analyze in which fields each country has its relative strengths. Overall, this study contributes to further insights into how the research performance of different countries may be analyzed and compared to inform research policy.

This paper compares the national scientific profiles of 199 countries in 254 fields, tracked by two indices of scientific specialization based respectively on indicators of input and output. For each country, the indicator of inputs considers the number of researchers in each field. The output indicator, named Total Fractional Impact , based on the citations of publications indexed in the Web of Science, measures the scholarly impact of knowledge produced in each field. For each country, the approach allows us to measure the deviations between the two profiles, thereby revealing potential differences in research efficiency and/or capital allocation across fields, compared to benchmark countries.

This work investigates the effects of researchers’ mobility on their research performance. The reference context is that of national intrasector mobility, in a country, Italy, characterized by a research system lacking the typical elements of an academic labor market. In particular, the analysis was conducted on 568 academics working at national universities and affected by mobility in the period 2009–2014. The effect of mobility on the variation of performance at the turn of the transfer was analyzed considering the interplay of demographic/sociological characteristics of the researchers, as well as contextual factors related to both the organization of origin and destination. Results show that it is the less productive academics who represent the larger share of those who move, and more than half of the mobile academics worsen their performance after the transfer.

In this work we ask whether and to what extent applying a predictor of a publication’s impact that is better than early citations has an effect on the assessment of the research performance of individual scientists. Specifically, we measure the total impact of Italian professors in the sciences and economics over time, valuing their publications first by early citations and then by a weighted combination of early citations and the impact factor of the hosting journal. As expected, the scores and ranks of the two indicators show a very strong correlation, but significant shifts occur in many fields, mainly in economics and statistics, and mathematics and computer science. The higher the share of uncited professors in a field and the shorter the citation time window, the more recommendable is recourse to the above combination.