Assessing the scientific productivity of Italian forest researchers using the Web of Science, SCOPUS and SCIMAGO databases

For long time a quantitative assessment of the productivity of Italian researchers has been lacking; the first and unique assessment was the Three-Year Research Evaluation for the period 2001-2003. Italian Law 240/2010, ruling the organization of research and universities, requires a system for the evaluation of the scientific productivity of Italian researchers. In 2011, both the National Agency for the Evaluation of Universities and Research Institutes (ANVUR) and the National University Council (CUN) proposed a set of evaluation criteria based on a bibliometric approach with indexes calculated using the information from the Thomson Reuters Web of Science (WOS) or the Elsevier SciVerse SCOPUS databases. The aim of this study is twofold: (i) to present the results of an assessment of the global aggregated scientific productivity of the Italian forestry community for 1996-2010 using the SCOPUS data available from the on-line SCIMAGO system; and (ii) to compare the WOS and SCOPUS databases with respect to three indexes (number of publications, number of citations, h-index) of the scientific productivity for university forest researchers in Italy. Two subcategories of forestry were considered: AGR05 - forest management and silviculture, and AGR06 - wood technology. Out of a total of 84 authors, 76 were considered in the analysis because not affected by unresolved homonymity or duplication. Overall, the trend in scientific productivity for Italian forestry is promising. Italy ranked 10(th) in terms of the h-index with an increasing trend in importance relative to other European countries, though the scientific contribution of authors was largely heterogeneous. Both WOS and SCOPUS databases were suitable sources of information for evaluating the scientific productivity of Italian authors. Although the two databases did not produce meaningful differences for any of the three indexes, the advantages and disadvantages of the two sources must be carefully considered if used operationally to evaluate the Italian scientific productivity.