The false myth of the rise in self-citations, and the impressively positive effect of bibliometric evaluations on the increase of the impact of Italian research
It has recently been claimed by Baccini and coauthors that due to ANVUR's bibliometric evaluations of individuals, departments, and universities, in Italy there has been a surge in self-citations in the last ten years, thus increasing the "inwardness" of Italian research more than has happened abroad. We have studied the database of Ioannidis et al. published on 12 August 2019 of the one hundred thousand most "highly cited" scientists, including about two thousand Italians, and we found that the problem of self-citations in relation to this scientific elite is not significant in Italy, while perhaps observing a small deviation in the low scores in the rankings. The effect indicated by Baccini et al. consequently, does not seem worrying for the scientific elite (we quantified it in 2 percent of the total of scientists of the "best" one hundred thousand), and is probably largely concentrated in the further less cited scientists. Evaluation agencies like ANVUR should probably exclude self-citations in future evaluations, for the noise introduced by the young researchers. The overall state of health of the Italian research system and the positive effect of the ANVUR assessments are demonstrated by the number of Italian researchers in the top one hundred thousand, which has increased by comparing the "career" databased of 22 years, with that of the "young" researchers in the "2017" database. Italy, looking at the elite researchers, not only is not the most indulgent in self-citations, but has shown the best improvements, proving that the introduction of ANVUR had a positive effect. Indeed, all countries apart from Italy have suffered a decline, even substantial (-20 percent on a national Japan scale), of the number of researchers present in the 2017 data sets compared to career data. Italy instead shows a +0.2 percent on a global basis and an impressive +11.53 percent on a national basis.