EVALUATION OF ITALIAN RESEARCH FOR THE YEARS 2001-2003 (VTR)

In many countries, strategies, procedures and instruments to evaluate research are object of public interest and their application is normal practice. The Ministerial Order n° 2206 on December 16th, 2003 regulated the first “Exercise of Evaluation of Italian Research” for the years 2001-2003 (VTR). The evaluation procedure was entrusted to the Italian National Committee for Research Evaluation (CIVR), aiming at the evaluation of the scientific performance of 77 universities (public and non public), 12 public research institutions and 13 other research institutions.
The 2001-2003 VTR has directly involved 102 participating structures. They were asked to autonomously select a pre-defined number of research products relative to the years 2001-2003 and to submit on-line the above products (considering the specificity of each item) to one out of 20 Area Panels, comprizing 14 Scientific Areas identified by of the Italian National University Council (CUN), together with 6 Special Areas, indicated by the CIVR.

The Panel relative to Area 02 (Physical Sciences) has inserted the University of Siena - Area of Physics - among the small structures that submitted 4 products for evaluation (the range was between 1 and 9 products). The result was a value of rating of 0.85 (normalized to a maximum value of 1).

THE VAI PROJECT

The VAI Project (Evaluation of the University Institutional Activities: Education and Research) has been promoted by the University of Siena within the evaluation activities of the quality of university services. It has been the first case in Italy of integrated evaluation of didactics and research, in application of “Campus One methodology” to all courses of Siena University and of a quantitative and qualitative evaluation of all the research structures.

Within the three years of the project (2002-2004), 3 phases have been defined. As a result of a self-evaluation report prepared by each scientific structure, an Audit Team - composed of peer-reviewers chosen among experts external to the University - carried out an evaluation to verify what declared in the report. As a result of that, the Audit Team expressed a qualitative judgment of comparison with similar structures in the EU Countries.

According to the evaluation of the Audit Team, the Siena Department of Physics was included in the Category B (among a total of five categories), both for the research activity - judged of very good scientific level - and for its impact at national and international level.

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