Abstract
Research assessment exercises have enjoyed ever-increasing popularity in many countries in recent years, both as a method to guide public funds allocation and as a validation tool for adopted research support policies. Italy’s most recently completed evaluation effort (VQR 2011–14) required each university to submit to the Ministry for Education, University, and Research (MIUR) 2 research products per author (3 in the case of other research institutions), chosen in such a way that the same product is not assigned to two authors belonging to the same institution. This constraint suggests that larger institutions, where collaborations among colleagues may be more frequent, could suffer a size-related bias in their evaluation scores. To validate our claim, we investigate the outcome of artificially splitting Sapienza University of Rome, one of the largest universities in Europe, in a number of separate partitions, according to several criteria, noting significant score increases for several partitioning scenarios.
Highlights
Research assessment exercises have been adopted by an increasing number of countries in recent years
To more precisely compute the impact of the no-duplicates rule, we would need to have the actual grades assigned by VQR to any publication. This data is not publicly available, so we resort to an estimate of the grades that we were able to compute for the areas that have been evaluated using mainly bibliometric criteria
We restrict our analysis to the bibliometric areas and we exclude authors from non-bibliometric areas, With this restriction, the number of Sapienza researchers evaluated under VQR amounts to 2816
Summary
Research assessment exercises have been adopted by an increasing number of countries in recent years. The results of the ANVUR evaluation was only made accessible to the authors of the research product, we have access to the ANVUR scores only in the aggregated format of the VQR 2011–2014 final report1 and tables.2 As the Italian version of the report3 is more complete, in this article we will refer to the data contained in this version.
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