The Intellectual Property & Science business of Thomson Reuters, the world’s leading provider of intelligent information for businesses and professionals, recently collaborated with the Agenzia Nazionale di Valutazione del sistema Universitario e della Ricerca (ANVUR), Italy’s national agency for the evaluation of universities and research centers, for the Valutazione della Qualità della Ricerca (VQR), an exercise to evaluate the quality of the nation’s research efforts. The report is the largest-scale evaluation of research in Italy’s history.
The VQR examined research outcomes in 14 disciplinary areas of study published between 2004 and 2010 by 95 universities, 12 research centers and 26 other institutions to identify the significance of the nation’s research output and how it compares globally. By reviewing a significant number of Italian research outcomes, ANVUR was able to gain a greater understanding of Italy’s research strengths, impact and neglected fields of study. The exercise also measured Italian research performance against that of other European nations and the emerging BRIC countries — Brazil, Russia, India and China.
Thomson Reuters assisted ANVUR in composing the VQR by providing data from Web of ScienceSM, the industry’s leading data citation index. This data helped ANVUR perform a bibliometric analysis on close to half of the 184,878 research outcomes. The single articles were analyzed for level of significance, innovation and internationalization. Additionally, ANVUR utilized custom reports and citation metrics from Thomson Reuters InCitesSM, the premier web-based research evaluation tool to assess Italy’s performance internationally. The analysis found Italy’s impact to be higher than the worldwide average for institutional research output and the growth of its number of publications to be higher than the European average.
“Choosing Thomson Reuters as one of our partners was essential to assess the impact of indexed journal articles within the VQR for the largest research assessment Italy has ever undertaken,” said Professor Sergio Benedetto, coordinator of the VQR. “The bibliometric data from Thomson Reuters were crucial to compute the two indicators used in the VQR bibliometric evaluation, as were the custom reports from InCites in a global comparison of Italy’s research strength as compared to other industrial countries.”
The VQR report also revealed that Italy’s research impact is greater than Spain’s, on par with France, but below that of Germany, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom.
“It was an honor to work with the ANVUR on this monumental project,” said Gordon Macomber, managing director of Scientific and Scholarly Research at Thomson Reuters. “Reviewing the scale of Italy’s vast scientific and scholarly research output is a complicated undertaking. We were happy to be among the partners to provide ANVUR with data to explicate the significant amount of research created by Italy’s researchers and institutions and to help evaluate its global impact.”
As part of the Thomson Reuters Research Analytics suite, InCites provides provosts, information professionals, research analysts and librarians with an unparalleled solution for conducting industry evaluations and benchmarking. InCites is powered by the multidisciplinary Web of Science, the world’s most trusted source for bibliometrics and citation information.
