Gender disparities in academic research: a comparative study of Armenia and Italy

Benchmarking research performance in a post-Soviet science system: the case of Armenia

Thirty years after the dissolution of the USSR, the significant disparity between the research infrastructures of former Soviet republics and Western countries remains evident. Despite various efforts to transform national research systems through policies aimed at encouraging participation in global academic networks, enhancing research quality, and disseminating results through high-impact international journals, the gap persists. This paper first examines the reforms implemented by the Arm...

Exploring the effects of journal article features: implications for automated prediction of scholarly impact

Purpose: Scholars face an unprecedented ever increasing demand for acting as reviewers for journals, recruitment and promotion committees, granting agencies, and research assessment agencies. Consequently, journal editors face an ever increasing scarcity of experts willing to act as reviewers. It is not infrequent that reviews diverge, which forces editors to recur to additional reviewers or make a final decision on their own. The purpose of the proposed bibliometric system is to support of e...

Peer review research assessment: are the reviewers really experts?

Peer review is a cornerstone of research evaluation, yet its credibility depends critically on the expertise of those conducting it, a condition too often assumed rather than verified. This study investigates the actual expertise of reviewers involved in Italy’s national research assessment exercise (VQR 2020(VQR-2024)). We analyze the disciplinary alignment between reviewers and submissions, as well as reviewers’ scientific performance, measured via a normalized ten-year citation impact indi...