New career advancement patterns in Italian universities: productivity, age and ranks of positions (original) (raw)
Related papers
An assessment of the first “scientific habilitation” for university appointments in Italy
Economia Politica, 2015
Nations with non-competitive higher education systems and with high levels of corruption, are more exposed to phenomena of discrimination and favoritism in faculty recruitment. Italy is a case in point, as shown by empirical studies, judicial reports and media attention. Governments have intervened repeatedly to reduce the problem, with scarce success. The 2010 reforms to the university recruitment system provided that access to the ranks of associate and full professor would now be possible only through an initial "scientific habilitation " to be awarded by sectorial committees of national experts. The objective of this work is to analyze the relationship of the recent habilitation procedure outcomes to the actual scientific merit of the various candidates, as well as to other variables that are explicative of possible practices of favoritism and discrimination. The analyses identify the presence of potential cases of discrimination and favoritism.
Italy’s New Requirements for Academic Careers: The New Habilitation and its Worthiness
The new habilitation, established in Italy in 2010 and commenced in 2012, was designed (outcomes released commencing December 2013). Its aim is to filter who will be eligible to apply for competitions for the two permanent level professor positions in the universities. The results of the first set of data are 20 scientific sectors representing more than 10% of all sectors analyzed to understand if the outcomes reflected in a worthy way the indicators of productivity and quality of scientific production of candidates. Some legal and statistical framework are fostered before the data analysis in order to have a better understanding of the reform and the context where it operates. The hypothesis of the worthiness is here addressed on the assumption that the current position held by a candidate should not play any role in the attainment of the habilitation. Splitting candidates into two roles and having controlled for age as a variable, the data was used to reveal that the indicators of quality of scientific production (H index for hard sciences and articles in top ranked journals for social sciences and humanities) are more frequently the best predictors. Though some limits of the present analysis are faced and illustrated, some critical points of this new institution are discussed.
The determinants of academic career advancement: Evidence from Italy
Science and Public Policy, 2015
In this work we investigate the determinants of professors' career advancement in Italian universities. From the analyses, it emerges that the fundamental determinant of an academic candidate's success is not scientific merit, but rather the number of years that the candidate has belonged to the same university as the selection committee president. Where applicants have participated in research work with the president, their probability of success also increases significantly. The factors of the years of service and occurrence of joint research for the other commission members also have an effect, however of lesser weight. The specific phenomenon of nepotism, although it exists, seems less important. The scientific quality of the commission members has negligible effect on the expected outcome of the competition, and even more so the geographic location of the university calling for the competition.
Career advancement and scientific performance in universities
Scientometrics, 2013
Many governments have placed priority on excellence in higher education as part of their policy agendas. Processes for recruitment and career advancement in universities thus have a critical role. The efficiency of faculty selection processes can be evaluated by comparing the subsequent performance of competition winners against that of the losers and the pre-existing staff of equal academic rank. Our study presents an empirical analysis concerning the recruitment procedures for associate professors in the Italian university system. The results of a bibliometric analysis of the hard science areas reveal that new associate professors are on average more productive than the incumbents. However a number of crucial concerns emerge, in particular concerning occurrence of non-winner candidates that are more productive than the winners over the subsequent triennium, and cases of winners that are completely unproductive. Beyond the implications for the Italian case, the analysis offers considerations for all decisionmakers regarding the ex post evaluation of the efficiency of the recruitment process and the desirability of providing selection committees with bibliometric indicators in support of evaluation (i.e. informed peer review).
Publish or Perish: An Analysis of the Academic Job Market in Italy
2014
We derive a theoretical model of effort in the presence of career concern based on the multi-unit all-pay auction, and closely inspired by the Italian academic market. In this model, the number of applicants, the number of new posts, and the relative importance of the determinants of promotion determine academics' effort. Because of the specific characteristics of Italian universities, where incentives operate only through promotion, and where all appointment panels are drawn from strictly separated and relatively narrow scientific sectors, the model fits well Italian academia, and we test it in a newly constructed dataset which collects the journal publications of all Italian academics working in universities. We find that individual researchers respond to incentives in the manner predicted by the theoretical model: more capable researchers respond to increases in the importance of the measurable determinants of promotion and in the competitiveness of the scientific sector by e...
Incentives and Careers in Italian Academia
2014
Publish or Perish? Incentives and Careers in Italian Academia * We derive a theoretical model of effort in the presence of career concern based on the multiunit all-pay auction, and closely inspired by the Italian academic market. In this model, the number of applicants, the number of new posts, and the relative importance of the determinants of promotion determine academics' effort. Because of the specific characteristics of Italian universities, where incentives operate only through promotion, and where all appointment panels are drawn from strictly separated and relatively narrow scientific sectors, the model fits well Italian academia, and we test it in a newly constructed dataset which collects the journal publications of all Italian academics working in universities. We find that individual researchers respond to incentives in the manner predicted by the theoretical model: more capable researchers respond to increases in the importance of the measurable determinants of promotion and in the competitiveness of the scientific sector by exerting more effort; less able researchers do the opposite.
Publish or Perish? Incentives and Careers in Italian Academia
SSRN Electronic Journal, 2000
Publish or Perish? Incentives and Careers in Italian Academia * We derive a theoretical model of effort in the presence of career concern based on the multiunit all-pay auction, and closely inspired by the Italian academic market. In this model, the number of applicants, the number of new posts, and the relative importance of the determinants of promotion determine academics' effort. Because of the specific characteristics of Italian universities, where incentives operate only through promotion, and where all appointment panels are drawn from strictly separated and relatively narrow scientific sectors, the model fits well Italian academia, and we test it in a newly constructed dataset which collects the journal publications of all Italian academics working in universities. We find that individual researchers respond to incentives in the manner predicted by the theoretical model: more capable researchers respond to increases in the importance of the measurable determinants of promotion and in the competitiveness of the scientific sector by exerting more effort; less able researchers do the opposite.
2015
and Social Research-the formal criteria used for the departmental recruitment process entirely overlap with the HR documents of the University of Trento, except for the specific descriptions of each scientific profile, and the department's choice whether or not to restrict the selection to some particular criteria, as described in the following subsections. For both RTD-a and RTD-b positions, candidates appointed with a post-doctoral grant for more than twelve years are excluded.
Italian Doctorate Holders and Academic Career. Progression in the Period 1986-2015
Carlo Alberto Notebooks, 2020
This paper describes the Italian Doctoral Holder and Academic Career (IDH-AC) database, which includes unique information on the population of doctoral graduates from Italian universities, in all disciplines, in the period from the first cycle of doctorates (1983-86) to 2006. Doctoral graduates who pursued an academic career in Italy were identified by matching with the list of academics active in Italian universities in the period 1990-2015. These original data allows us to shed light on several issues related to the Italian academic labour market, such as gender, inbreeding, mobility, hiring and promotion patterns. The paper i) describes the record linkage between two datasets and ii) presents an exploratory statistical analysis of academic employment outcomes for the population of researchers who were awarded a doctoral degree from an Italian university over a 20 year period.
Scientometrics, 2016
We investigate the question of how long top scientists retain their stardom. We observe the research performance of all Italian professors in the sciences over three consecutive four-year periods, between 2001 and 2012. The top scientists of the first period are identified on the basis of research productivity, and their performance is then tracked through time. The analyses demonstrate that more than a third of the nation's top scientists maintain this status over the three consecutive periods, with higher shares occurring in the life sciences and lower ones in engineering. Compared to males, females are less likely to maintain top status. There are also regional differences, among which top status is less likely to survive in southern Italy than in the north. Finally we investigate the longevity of unproductive professors, and then check whether the career progress of the top and unproductive scientists is aligned with their respective performances. The results appear to have implications for national policies on academic recruitment and advancement.