Title: The false myth of the rise in self-citations, and the impressively positive effect of bibliometric evaluations on the increase of the impact of Italian research

Authors: Pietro D'Antuono and Michele Ciavarella

Categories: physics.soc-ph math.ST stat.TH Comments: 20 pages, 8 figures, 10 tables, in English and inItalian License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/

https://arxiv.org/abs/1910.02948

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It has recently been claimed by Baccini and coauthors that due to ANVUR’s bibliometric evaluations of individuals, departments, and universities, in Italy there has been a surge in self-citations in the last ten years, thus increasing the “inwardness” of Italian research more than has happened abroad. We have studied the database of Ioannidis et al. published on 12 August 2019 of the one hundred thousand most “highly cited” scientists, including about two thousand Italians, and we found that the problem of self-citations in relation to this scientific elite is not significant in Italy, while perhaps observing a small deviation in the low scores in the rankings. The effect indicated by Baccini et al. consequently, does not seem worrying for the scientific elite (we quantified it in 2% of the total of scientists of the “best” one hundred thousand), and is probably largely concentrated in the further less cited scientists. Evaluation agencies like ANVUR should probably exclude self-citations in future evaluations, for the noise introduced by the young researchers. The overall state of health of the Italian research system and the positive effect of the ANVUR assessments are demonstrated by the number of Italian researchers in the top one hundred thousand, which has increased by comparing the “career” databased of 22 years, with that of the “young” researchers in the “2017” database. Italy, looking at the elite researchers, not only is not the most indulgent in self-citations, but has shown the best improvements, proving that the introduction of ANVUR had a positive effect. Indeed, all countries apart from Italy have suffered a decline, even substantial (–20% on a national Japan scale), of the number of researchers present in the 2017 data sets compared to career data. Italy instead shows a +0.2% on a global basis and an impressive +11.53% on a national basis.

Data available at

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1sJjVusbJZYSjZVY4n9ckFhEA0G6u7iMQ

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1IG9AFcYZniudN4GI3mU54KaR-a3tLATD

CORRESPONDENCE 15 OCTOBER 2019 Citation doping not for Italy’s elites Pietro D’Antuono &Michele Ciavarella









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Factors other than citation doping could have contributed to the recent rise in the number of Italians among the 100,000 most highly cited scientists (see Nature http://doi.org/dcgj; 2019).

Of the 100,000 most highly cited scientists in the database compiled by John Ioannidis et al. (PLoS Biol. http://doi.org/gf6ckr; 2019), including some 2,000 Italians, we found that the proportion using self-citation to boost their research impact was probably only 2% (see P. D’Antuono and M. Ciavarella Preprint at https://arxiv.org/abs/1910.02948v1; 2019). The practice seems to be more common among early-career scientists who are otherwise less frequently cited.

ANVUR, the Italian agency for research evaluation (go.nature.com/2kwu5jj), should in our view exclude self-citations from future evaluations, to avoid this ‘noise’.

We consider that the jump in the number of Italians in the 100,000 most highly cited researchers is a symptom of the overall health of the Italian research system. It underscores the positive effect of introducing ANVUR in 2006.

Nature 574, 333 (2019)