Tre metafore dell’università italiana

Giuseppe De Nicolao – Università di Pavia

Milano, 17 Novembre 2010

L’università italiana è ...

Prima metafora

L’università italiana è ...un sacco bucato

M. Gelmini, 2010

Prima metafora

The Shanghai Institute of Education has recently published a list of the top 500 world universities. The order is based on the number of Nobel laureates from 1911 to 2002, highly cited researchers, articles published in Science and Nature, the number of papers published and an average of these four criteria compared with the number of full-time faculty members in each institution. I believe none of these criteria are as reliable as citations.

D. A. King, “The scientific impact of nations - What different countries get for their research spending”, Nature, vol. 430|15, July 2004, www.nature.com/nature

Assessing scientific impact of nations

Goals of the presentation

1. Assess the scientific impact of Italy as measured by citations

1. Assess research efficiency by input-output analysis• input = research spending• output = scientific impact

Data• Citations 2008

– Cumulative cites of scientific documents published in 2008: 15 best countries are considered

– Source: SCImago (powered by SCOPUS) http://www.scimagojr.com

• Gross Domestic Product (GDP’06)• Research & Development expenditure (R&D’06)

– Currency unit: million dollars (M$) (Purchasing-Power-Parity adjusted)

– Source: World Bank http://data.worldbank.org

What is the scientific impact of countries?

Italy’s Relative Production of Documents

What is the wealth of countries?

How much do countries spend in R&D?

How much do countries spend relative to their GDP?

R&D intensity = R&D/GDP

Bad news:Italy’s R&D intensity ranks #25

among 36 countries

Efficiency assessment

• Fact: cited papers are mostly written by academic researchersGagliarducci, Ichino, Peri, Perotti (2005) http://www2.dse.unibo.it/ichino/gipp_declino_18.pdf

• Business R&D expenditure has other goals: technical innovation, patents, new products, …

• Relevant expenditure to be considered:

Higher-education Expenditure in R&D (HERD‘06)

Source: OECD Main Science and Technology Indicators, 2009/2

How much do countries spend in academic R&D?

What do countries get for their academic research spending ?

Academic research efficiency = cites/HERD

Is Italy’s research inefficient?

• The ranking of Italy’s citations (#8) is equal the ranking of academic research spending (#8)

you get what you spend for

• Academic research efficiency: Italy is more efficient than Germany, France, USA, Canada, Korea and, Japan