Open bibliographic data and the Italian National Scientific Qualification: measuring coverage of academic fields

TL;DR

This paper evaluates open bibliographic datasets' potential to replace proprietary databases in academic evaluations, focusing on the Italian National Scientific Qualification across various disciplines.

Contribution

It provides an assessment of open bibliographic data coverage and suitability for academic evaluation processes in Italy, highlighting strengths and gaps across disciplines.

Findings

Open datasets are suitable for disciplines like mathematics and natural sciences.

Significant gaps exist in fields such as history and psychology.

Further efforts are needed to improve open data coverage in certain areas.

Abstract

The importance of open bibliographic repositories is widely accepted by the scientific community. For evaluation processes, however, there is still some skepticism: even if large repositories of open access articles and free publication indexes exist and are continuously growing, assessment procedures still rely on proprietary databases, mainly due to the richness of the data available in these proprietary databases and the services provided by the companies they are offered by. This paper investigates the status of open bibliographic data of three of the most used open resources, namely Microsoft Academic Graph, Crossref and OpenAIRE, evaluating their potentialities as substitutes of proprietary databases for academic evaluation processes. We focused on the Italian National Scientific Qualification (NSQ), the Italian process for University Professor qualification, which uses data from commercial indexes, and investigated similarities and differences between research areas, disciplines and application roles. The main conclusion is that open datasets are ready to be used for some disciplines, among which mathematics, natural sciences, economics and statistics, even if there is still room for improvement; but there is still a large gap to fill in others - like history, philosophy, pedagogy and psychology - and a stronger effort is required from researchers and institutions.