PlumX and The University of Rome Tor Vergata

The University of Rome Tor Vergata is a public research university located in Rome, Italy.

TVUR_Logo     The university has 27 research departments and inter-departmental research centers. There is a wide variety of disciplines including Nuclear Physics, Economics and Philosophy. Due to this wide range of disciplines and scholars, university staff recognized that using traditional citation measurement tools did not satisfy their requirements evaluating and understanding research conducted at the university.

In this video, Dr. Giuseppe Novelli, Rector and Professor of Human Genetics, University of  Rome Tor Vergata, describes several ways in which the university finds citation measures lacking. First, they do not do justice to the social sciences and the humanities. Second, they do a poor job with open access journals. Third, they are inadequate in representing researchers who are working in niche areas. Specifically, Dr. Novelli related that as a geneticist, he understands that discoveries in rare diseases will not get as many citations as ones in an area like Multiple Sclerosis. But, should that be a reason to motivate emerging geneticists to focus on “popular” diseases?

Dr. Novelli sees science and research as a complex system that needs a complex system to help understand and evaluate it. That is the role he sees for PlumX. In his words:

PlumX is a good system to put together many different indicators for the evaluation of research. As a director, I see that a system like this could be very important in the future to help distribute the resources to different departments or different groups of researchers.