Abstract: The
new habilitation, established in Italy in 2010 and commenced in 2012, was
designed (outcomes released commencing December 2013). Its aim is to filter who
will be eligible to apply for competitions for the two permanent level
professor positions in the universities. The results of the first set of data
are 20 scientific sectors representing more than 10% of all sectors analyzed to
understand if the outcomes reflected in a worthy way the indicators of
productivity and quality of scientific production of candidates. Some legal and
statistical framework are fostered before the data analysis in order to have a
better understanding of the reform and the context where it operates. The
hypothesis of the worthiness is here addressed on the assumption that the
current position held by a candidate should not play any role in the attainment
of the habilitation. Splitting candidates into two roles and having controlled
for age as a variable, the data was used to reveal that the indicators of
quality of scientific production (H index for hard sciences and articles in top
ranked journals for social sciences and humanities) are more frequently the
best predictors. Though some limits of the present analysis are faced and
illustrated, some critical points of this new institution are discussed.
This work is financed by
FEDER through the Operational Competitiveness Programme – COMPETE and by
national funds through FCT – Foundation for Science and Technology under the
framework of the project Pest-OE/CED/UI0757/2013.