Assessing technical and cost efficiency of research activities: A case study of the Italian university system

TL;DR

This study uses data envelopment analysis to evaluate the technical and cost efficiency of research activities across Italian universities, employing a novel bottom-up bibliometric approach for more precise assessment.

Contribution

It introduces a bottom-up bibliometric methodology for efficiency assessment, differing from traditional peer review and bibliographic approaches, applied to Italian university research data.

Findings

Significant variation in disciplinary area rankings within and across universities.

Efficiency rankings depend heavily on the chosen indicator.

Disciplinary differences influence overall efficiency assessments.

Abstract

This paper employs data envelopment analysis (DEA) to assess both technical and cost efficiency of research activities of the Italian university system. Differently from both peer review and the top-down discipline-invariant bibliographic approaches used elsewhere, a bottom-up bibliometric methodology is applied. Publications are assigned first to authors and then to one of nine scientific and technical university disciplinary areas. Inputs are specified in terms of the numbers of full, associate and assistant professors and outputs as the number of publications, contributions to publications and their scientific impact as variously measured across the disciplines included. DEA is undertaken cross-sectionally using the averages of these inputs and outputs over the period 2001-2003. The results typically show much variation in the rankings of the disciplinary areas within and across universities, depending on the efficiency indicator employed.