The impact of the national assessment exercises on self-citation rate and publication venue: an empirical investigation on the engineering academic sector in Italy

The aim of the present study is to provide an overview of the research activity, in terms of productivity and impact, of the Italian public universities and their academic staff in the engineering sector (EngSec), that is about seven thousand researchers. Beyond the increased bibliometric performance of the considered research area in the last decade, attention will be focused on the possible feedback on publication habits induced by regulations which progressively introduced, in the research world, strong competitiveness elements, such as evaluation exercises, covering both the single researcher career and the funding system. The effects of this feedback are also explored from the point of view of the self-citation phenomenon, which is said to increasingly affect the research world at large. The EngSec is analyzed both as a whole and decomposed in cultural areas to give a more comprehensive view of this important cultural segment of the academia. In 10 years, the productivity of the sector in term of Scopus documents is roughly doubled, with a consistent shift from conference papers to journal articles. The impact also showed a similar trend with self-citations exposing an evident peak in the year 2013.