Working toward meritocracy in Italy
It's no news that thousands of Italian researchers have left their home country in order to pursue their careers; what is news, however, is that we now have a scientific study shedding light on this phenomenon. It was conducted by the Via Academy, an association dedicated to statistical analyses of the research outputs of Italians (published on the TIS reports website).
Clearly, the high impact of scientists who are now abroad bears testament to the quality of the Italian education and attitude when it comes to Computer Science. The inevitable question thus arises: why are Computer Scientists who work in Italy not among the top in either the world ranking or the TIS list? I have been asking this question to various colleagues in the field, both inside and outside the Via-academy network. The consistent answer I have been receiving is that there is a clear disadvantage Computer Scientists must face when working in Italy with respect to their colleagues who work abroad. This disadvantage derives from a mixture of excessive teaching duties, a lack of large-scale funding and a limited recognition of scientific merit
Recent reports include the "Top 100 researchers- home & abroad" (which includes the quotation above) and the "Top 50 Italian Institutes".
The H-method: a first step towards meritocracy
This type of analysis is mainly based on the H-index method (an index that attempts to measure both the productivity and impact of a scientist's or scholar's published work); it therefore suffers from various limitations deriving from factors such as the difference in average number of publications among disciplines (especially between the sciences and the humanities), or from the fact that it's a purely quantitative measure.
However, it seems to me as being an important step in the right direction: meritocracy.
P.S. I found a recent article by Ignazio Marino on this topic: Working Toward Meritocracy in Italy, Ignazio R. Marino, Science 6 June 2008: 1289. I couldn't download it, but here's a short commentary I found online:
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See also:
2014
paper Factoid-based Prosopography and Computer Ontologies: towards an integrated approach
Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, Dec 2014. doi: 10.1093/llc/fqt037
2013
New Technologies in Medieval and Renaissance Studies, (forthcoming). (part of the 'Envisioning REED in the Digital Age' collection)
2011
Representing Knowledge in the Digital Humanities, Lawrence, Kansas, Sep 2011.
2006
Poster paper presented at the 3rd European Semantic Web Conference (ESWC-06), Budva, Montenegro, Jun 2006.