Scientometric analysis of national university research performance in analytical chemistry on the basis of academic publications: Italy as case study

Italian academic performance in analytical chemistry is evaluated by scrutinizing all the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) publications produced during the professional lifetimes by the 80 Italian university professors in February 2009, providing a method for judging the scientific results of other countries in the same or other disciplines. The research was carried out through the SciFinder bibliographic search engine, which sifts through two databases. For completeness of information, the study finds that recent papers report higher impact factor (IF) values, and in that case only a very limited number of journals that focused exclusively on the field of analytical chemistry for the time period 2000 2007 are considered. It is also found that a more careful selection of the journals invited to publish the results of scientific research, together with improvement in the quality of the research, could explain the significant increase in the impact factor for junior professors compared with senior professors.