Peer review for the evaluation of the academic research: the Italian experience

Emanuela Reale (), Anna Barbara () and Antonio Costantini
Additional contact information
Emanuela Reale: Ceris - Institute for Economic Research on Firms and Growth, Rome, Italy
Anna Barbara: University G. D’Annunzio, Chieti Pescara, Italy

CERIS Working Paper from CNR-IRCrES Research Institute on Sustainable Economic Growth - Torino (TO) ITALY - former Institute for Economic Research on Firms and Growth - Moncalieri (TO) ITALY

Abstract: Peer review, that is the evaluation process based on judgments formulated by independent experts, is generally used for different goals: the allocation of research funding, the review of the research results submitted for publication in scientific journals, and the assessment of the quality of research conducted by Universities and university-related Institutes. The paper deals with the latter type of peer review. The aim is to understand how the characteristics of the Italian experience provide useful lessons for improving peer review effectiveness for evaluating the academic research. More specifically, the paper investigates the peer review process developed within the Three-Year Research Assessment Exercise (VTR) in Italy. Our analysis covers four disciplinary sectors: chemistry, biology, humanities and economics. Thus, the choice includes two “hard science” sectors, which have similar type of research output submitted for the three-year evaluation process, and two sectors with different types of output. The results provide evidences, which highlight the important role played by peer review for judging the quality of the academic research in different fields of science, and for comparing different institutions’ performance. Moreover, some basic features of the evaluation process are discussed, in order to understand their usefulness for reinforcing the effectiveness of the peers’ final outcome.

Keywords: Scientific research; Evaluation; Peer review; University; Academic institutions (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 29 pages
Date: 2006-12
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.byterfly.eu/islandora/object/librib:352057 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:csc:cerisp:200615

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CERIS Working Paper from CNR-IRCrES Research Institute on Sustainable Economic Growth - Torino (TO) ITALY - former Institute for Economic Research on Firms and Growth - Moncalieri (TO) ITALY Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Anna Perin () and Giancarlo Birello ().