Why has scientific productivity increased in Italy?

摘要

Italy has often been accused of no transparency and even corruption in the competition for employment in the public sector. Universities are familiar with this controversy. However, a new element was introduced in competitions for university roles in 2011. Each potential candidate judged as suitable to be a professor in an Italian academy should undergo a national assessment on the basis of three objective criteria of scientific productivity. These three criteria are: the number of scientific papers published in journals indexed on major international depositories (ie, SCOPUS and ISI), the number of citations per year obtained for such papers, and the contemporary H-index.