IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/spr/scient/v87y2011i3d10.1007_s11192-011-0350-9.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Where do Italian universities stand? An in-depth statistical analysis of national and international rankings

Author

Listed:
  • Marco Geraci

    (UCL Institute of Child Health)

  • M. Degli Esposti

    (The University of Manchester, Michael Smith building)

Abstract

In a previous article (Degli Esposti and Geraci. Bulletin of Italian Politics, 2011), we presented an historical survey of the university reform laws that took place in Italy in the last 30 years. On that occasion, we stressed how important is merit evaluation for academics and their institutions, especially in view of the much debated but not yet implemented ‘Gelmini’ reform with its long awaited new regulation for accessing academic positions (concorsi) and for determining individual weight in financial resource allocation among universities. Here, we present and compare several rankings used to evaluate the prestige and merit of Italian universities. We also consider alternative approaches to academic rankings that highlight peculiar aspects of the universities in Italy which cannot be reasonably accounted for by other international rankings. Finally, we propose a new approach that combines both national and international standing of Italian universities. It is hoped that this study will provide practical guidance to policy makers for establishing the criteria upon which merit should be assessed.

Suggested Citation

  • Marco Geraci & M. Degli Esposti, 2011. "Where do Italian universities stand? An in-depth statistical analysis of national and international rankings," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 87(3), pages 667-681, June.
    • Handle: RePEc:spr:scient:v:87:y:2011:i:3:d:10.1007_s11192-011-0350-9
    DOI: 10.1007/s11192-011-0350-9
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11192-011-0350-9
    File Function: Abstract
    Download Restriction: Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1007/s11192-011-0350-9?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Themis Lazaridis, 2010. "Ranking university departments using the mean h-index," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 82(2), pages 211-216, February.
    2. Thierry Marchant, 2009. "An axiomatic characterization of the ranking based on the h-index and some other bibliometric rankings of authors," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 80(2), pages 325-342, August.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Alfio Ferrara & Silvia Salini, 2012. "Ten challenges in modeling bibliographic data for bibliometric analysis," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 93(3), pages 765-785, December.
    2. Mario Nicoliello, 2023. "Some Notes about Academic Evaluation: New Challenges for Accounting Scholars in Italy," International Journal of Business and Management, Canadian Center of Science and Education, vol. 16(11), pages 1-51, February.
    3. Francesca DE BATTISTI & Silvia SALINI, 2011. "Robust analysis of bibliometric data," Departmental Working Papers 2011-36, Department of Economics, Management and Quantitative Methods at Università degli Studi di Milano.
    4. M. Benito & R. Romera, 2011. "Improving quality assessment of composite indicators in university rankings: a case study of French and German universities of excellence," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 89(1), pages 153-176, October.
    5. Aparna Basu & Sumit Kumar Banshal & Khushboo Singhal & Vivek Kumar Singh, 2016. "Designing a Composite Index for research performance evaluation at the national or regional level: ranking Central Universities in India," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 107(3), pages 1171-1193, June.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Muzammil Tahira & Rose Alinda Alias & Aryati Bakri, 2013. "Scientometric assessment of engineering in Malaysians universities," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 96(3), pages 865-879, September.
    2. Sziklai, Balázs R., 2021. "Ranking institutions within a discipline: The steep mountain of academic excellence," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 15(2).
    3. Juan A Crespo & Ignacio Ortuño-Ortín & Javier Ruiz-Castillo, 2012. "The Citation Merit of Scientific Publications," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 7(11), pages 1-9, November.
    4. Ash Mohammad Abbas, 2011. "Weighted indices for evaluating the quality of research with multiple authorship," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 88(1), pages 107-131, July.
    5. Franceschini, Fiorenzo & Maisano, Domenico, 2011. "Structured evaluation of the scientific output of academic research groups by recent h-based indicators," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 5(1), pages 64-74.
    6. Aniruddha Maiti & Sai Shi & Slobodan Vucetic, 2023. "An ablation study on the use of publication venue quality to rank computer science departments," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 128(8), pages 4197-4218, August.
    7. Mukherjee, Conan & Alam, Aftab, 2016. "On Evaluating Author's Performance by Publications: An Axiomatic Study," Working Papers 2016:14, Lund University, Department of Economics, revised 12 May 2017.
    8. Nikolaos A. Kazakis, 2014. "Bibliometric evaluation of the research performance of the Greek civil engineering departments in National and European context," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 101(1), pages 505-525, October.
    9. Antonin Mac'e, 2017. "The Limits of Citation Counts," Papers 1711.02695, arXiv.org, revised Sep 2023.
    10. Josep Freixas & Roger Hoerl & William S. Zwicker, 2023. "Nash's bargaining problem and the scale-invariant Hirsch citation index," Papers 2309.01192, arXiv.org.
    11. Ghassan Abdul-Majeed & Wissam Mahmood & Nasri S. M. Namer, 2021. "Measuring research performance of Iraqi universities using Scopus data," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 126(3), pages 2349-2363, March.
    12. Antonin Macé, 2023. "The Limits of Citation Counts," Working Papers halshs-01630095, HAL.
    13. Chambers, Christopher P. & Miller, Alan D., 2014. "Scholarly influence," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 151(C), pages 571-583.
    14. Nicolas Carayol & Ghislaine Filliatreau & Agenor Lahatte, 2012. "Reference classes: a tool for benchmarking universities’ research," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 93(2), pages 351-371, November.
    15. Kuan, Chung-Huei & Huang, Mu-Hsuan & Chen, Dar-Zen, 2013. "Cross-field evaluation of publications of research institutes using their contributions to the fields’ MVPs determined by h-index," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 7(2), pages 455-468.
    16. J. Atsu Amegashie, 2020. "Citations And Incentives In Academic Contests," Economic Inquiry, Western Economic Association International, vol. 58(3), pages 1233-1244, July.
    17. Haley, M. Ryan & McGee, M. Kevin, 2020. "Jointly valuing journal visibility and author citation count: An axiomatic approach," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 14(1).
    18. Mark Levene & Trevor Fenner & Judit Bar-Ilan, 2019. "Characterisation of the $$\chi$$χ-index and the rec-index," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 120(2), pages 885-896, August.
    19. Dimitris Kremmydas & Kyriakos Drivas, 2015. "Assembling the research profile of Greek Economic Departments," Working Papers 2015-4, Agricultural University of Athens, Department Of Agricultural Economics.
    20. Conan Mukherjee & Ranojoy Basu & Aftab Alam, 2020. "A measure of authorship by publications," Managerial and Decision Economics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 41(3), pages 354-361, April.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:spr:scient:v:87:y:2011:i:3:d:10.1007_s11192-011-0350-9. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.springer.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.