The importance of accounting for the number of co-authors and their order when assessing research performance at the individual level in the life sciences

Accurate measurement of research productivity should take account of both the number of co-authors of every scientific work and of the different contributions of the individuals. For researchers in the life sciences, common practice is to indicate such contributions through position in the authors list. In this work, we measure the distortion introduced to bibliometric ranking lists for scientific productivity when the number of co-authors or their position in the list is ignored. The field of observation consists of all Italian university professors working in the life sciences, with scientific production examined over the period 2004–2008. The outcomes of the study lead to a recommendation against using indicators or evaluation methods that ignore the different authors’ contributions to the research results.     

Individual research performance: A proposal for comparing apples to oranges

The evaluation of performance at the individual level is of fundamental importance in informing management decisions. The literature provides various indicators and types of measures, however a problem that is still unresolved and little addressed is how to compare the performance of researchers working in different fields (apples to oranges). In this work we propose a solution, testing various scaling factors for the distributions of research productivity in 174 scientific fields. The analysis is based on the observation of scientific production by all Italian university researchers active in the hard sciences over the period 2004–2008, as indexed by the Web of Science. The most effective scaling factor is the average of the productivity distribution of researchers with productivity above zero.     

Education for Older People in Italy

This article provides information on trends in formal and informal adult education in Italy, with a particular focus on the older learners (over 65). Main providers, programs, objectives/motivations, and financial and legal framework are described. In general, over-65-year-old people were found to be underrepresented in participation. They were also concentrated in activities of informal education (through, for example, Third Age Universities) instead of formal courses that are oriented mainly towards the development of skills/competencies for the labor market. In order to improve the situation of older people in the future, the question of financing is one of the main challenges to be addressed by policymakers.     

Coordinating innovation projects with high tech suppliers through contracts

This paper investigates the supply chain (SC) management and innovation strategies with the purpose to identify: 1) which commercial contracts are suitable to coordinate SC innovation projects; 2) which motivations push SC members to adopt contracts to pursue innovation projects; and 3) how contractual clauses differ in different stages of the innovation process. A comparative case study among five High Tech (HT) companies in the Netherlands uncovers the motivations for adopting certain contracts over others. The findings illustrate that contracts discussed in the literature (sales-rebate, buy back, revenue sharing, etc.) successfully work for commercial agreements but not at all for coordinating joint innovation projects. Motivations for adopting these contracts do not limit to general company characteristics but also stretch from historical reasons to future strategies. The findings help HT companies to setting up the basis of a contract to coordinate joint innovation projects within SCs.     

A trajectory of teacher development in early and mid-career

Scholars in recent years have studied the professional development of teachers, identifying stages or phases that teachers characteristically experience during their careers. Little research, however, has focused specifically on the professional development of teachers during early and mid-career (years 1–10), which is the aim of the present study. An understanding of such development is important for school administrators and teacher educators if they are to respond effectively to teachers’ professional needs and help them achieve their full potential as practitioners. Our study is based on interviews we conducted with 53 teachers who had graduated from a particular 5-year teacher education programme in western United States over a 10-year period. They taught students ages 5 through 13. Through analysis of the interviews, we identified six themes that, we argue, reveal a trajectory of professional development teachers experience as they become increasingly able practitioners. We explain how the themes are related to the concepts of teacher identity and teacher agency, and we suggest ways that administrators, inservice teacher educators, and policymakers can better support teachers during their early and mid-careers. The study adds a new dimension—that of a multifaceted trajectory—to current theory on teacher development.     

An Intellectual Capital perspective for Business Model Innovation in technology-intensive industries: empirical evidences from Italian spin-offs

Innovation and competition take place increasingly between Business Models (BM), and not just among products, processes, and technologies. Therefore, Business Model Innovation (BMI) becomes the key process to unleash value creation for both established and new companies, and, among these latter, particularly for technological spin-offs. For their constituent characteristics, it emerges that BMI in technological spin-offs appears to be related to the effective management of the Intellectual Capital (IC). Despite this, current research has paid little attention to decline BMI through the lenses of IC. This study aims to provide a contribution in this direction by investigating how technological spin-offs innovate their BM by leveraging their IC dimensions. A review of relevant literature on BMI has been carried out. Then, a case study methodology has been adopted to analyze seven technological spin-offs. The analysis highlighted three main trajectories of BMI, defined in terms of the BMI scope and the main exploited IC dimension. The discussion of findings from a research and practical perspective contributes to the debate on BMI, by providing a new interpretative key based on the relevance of the IC dimensions.     

The FarmBuiLD model (farm building landscape design): First definition of parametric tools

The paper presents a set of synthetic architectural parameters dealing with the morphological aspects of rural buildings. The definition of these parameters represents a fundamental step of the FarmBuiLD research model (farm building landscape design), proposed by the authors as a tool for the analysis of the architectural characteristics of both historical and contemporary rural buildings, as well as the meta-design of new construction and transformation of contemporary rural buildings. The FarmBuiLD's module of physiognomical characterization of rural buildings allows to define the analytical-design parameters through the following phases: a critical analysis of the international scientific literature, a preliminary identification of the essential physiognomical characteristics of rural buildings, and an in-depth study of validation and calibration focusing on specific study cases. This work presents the preliminary definition of the parameters and a discussion about their experimental application through illustrative examples. Given their numeric value and strictly instrumental, thematic and complementary nature, the proposed parameters do not have any geometric, formal or stylistic characterization, and thus can be considered as capable of leaving an appropriate level of freedom within the design of solutions aimed at meeting both contemporary and future functional and aesthetic needs.     

Does chess instruction improve mathematical problem-solving ability? Two experimental studies with an active control group

It has been proposed that playing chess enables children to improve their ability in mathematics. These claims have been recently evaluated in a meta-analysis (Sala & Gobet, 2016, Educational Research Review, 18, 46–57), which indicated a significant effect in favor of the groups playing chess. However, the meta-analysis also showed that most of the reviewed studies used a poor experimental design (in particular, they lacked an active control group). We ran two experiments that used a three-group design including both an active and a passive control group, with a focus on mathematical ability. In the first experiment (N = 233), a group of third and fourth graders was taught chess for 25 hours and tested on mathematical problem-solving tasks. Participants also filled in a questionnaire assessing their meta-cognitive ability for mathematics problems. The group playing chess was compared to an active control group (playing checkers) and a passive control group. The three groups showed no statistically significant difference in mathematical problem-solving or metacognitive abilities in the posttest. The second experiment (N = 52) broadly used the same design, but the Oriental game of Go replaced checkers in the active control group. While the chess-treated group and the passive control group slightly outperformed the active control group with mathematical problem solving, the differences were not statistically significant. No differences were found with respect to metacognitive ability. These results suggest that the effects (if any) of chess instruction, when rigorously tested, are modest and that such interventions should not replace the traditional curriculum in mathematics.     

Revisiting size effects in higher education research productivity

The potential occurrence of variable returns to size in research activity is a factor to be considered in choices about the size of research organizations and also in the planning of national research assessment exercises, so as to avoid favoring those organizations that would benefit from such occurrence. The aim of the current work is to improve on weaknesses in past inquiries concerning returns to size through application of a research productivity measurement methodology that is more accurate and robust. The method involves field-standardized measurements that are free of the typical distortions of aggregate measurement by discipline or organization. The analysis is conducted for 183 hard science fields in all 77 Italian universities (time period 2004–2008) and allows detection of potential differences by field.