Evaluation of Research Products Released During a National Project Funded by the Italian Ministry of Health

Abstract 

Evaluation of research products released during activities that have received public funds should be a mandatory practice. In this study, we evaluated the research products released during the research program “Innovative Strategies to Expand Cadaveric Donor Pool for Liver Transplantation” (SITF Project), funded by the Italian Ministry of Health. The SITF Project prefigured the participation of Italian transplantation centers with more advanced experience in the field of liver transplantation. The research products released during the SITF Project were evaluated according to Guidelines for Research Evaluation of the Committee for Evaluation of Research (CIVR) from the Italian Ministry of Education, University and Research. Thus, we considered as the research products released during the SITF Project the number of articles published in English language in peer-reviewed scientific journals by each operative unit (OU), as returned by PubMed. The articles were included on the basis of relationship with the research lines of the SITF Project and availability of the impact factor (IF) calculated by Thomson Scientific for each journal. Following these criteria, 62 research products were released during the executive phase of the SITF Project (January 1, 2004–December 31, 2005). All research products were original articles, with no reviews or letters. The articles were published in 10 different scientific journals (mean IF, 2.64 ± 1.74). Spearman's rank test found a weak negative correlation between journal IF and number of published articles (r = −.2919; P = .413). Although the OU involved in the coordination of the SITF Project released a relatively high number of articles (n = 8; IF, 0.923 ± 0.352), several other OUs obtained better results for number of articles (9–11) and/or IF (3.071 ± 2.248 or 2.959 ± 1.779). In projects that benefit from public funds, the potential negative impact of coordination activities to scientific production should be adequately considered.