It is several years since national research evaluation systems around the globe started making use of quantitative indicators to measure the performance of researchers. Nevertheless, the effects on these systems on the behavior of the evaluated researchers are still largely unknown. For investigating this topic, we propose a new inwardness indicator able to gauge the degree of scientific self-referentiality of a country. Inwardness is defined as the proportion of citations coming from the country over the total number of citations gathered by the country. A comparative analysis of the trends for the G10 countries in the years 2000-2016 reveals a net increase of the Italian inwardness. Italy became, both globally and for a large majority of the research fields, the country with the highest inwardness and the lowest rate of international collaborations. The change in the Italian trend occurs in the years following the introduction in 2011 of national regulations in which key passages of professional careers are governed by bibliometric indicators. A most likely explanation of the peculiar Italian trend is a generalized strategic use of citations in the Italian scientific community, both in the form of strategic author self-citations and of citation clubs. We argue that the Italian case offers crucial insights on the constitutive effects of evaluation systems. As such, it could become a paradigmatic case in the debate about the use of indicators in science-policy contexts.

Acknowledgments: My gratitude goes first to Ludo Waltman (CWTS Leiden), who was my supervisor during my visiting period at CWTS, for very helpful advice and precious insights. I would like to thank also my advisor Luca Guzzardi and my colleagues in the Doctoral School in Philosophy and Human Sciences at the University of Milan (especially Valerio Buonomo, Daniele Cassaghi and Emiliano Tolusso) for discussing with me several parts of this research. I would finally like to thank two anonymous reviewers for providing useful suggestions.

Two alternative accounts can be given of the information contained in the acknowledgments of academic publications. According to the mainstream normative account the acknowledgments serve to repay debts towards informal collaborators. According to the strategic account, by contrast, the acknowledgments serve to increase the perceived quality of papers by associating the authors to influential scholars. The two accounts are assessed by analyzing the acknowledgments of 1218 articles published in the "top-five journals" of economics for the years 2015-2019. The analysis is focused on six dimensions: (i) the style of acknowledging texts, (ii) the distribution of mentions, (iii) the identity of the most mentioned acknowledgees, (iv) the shares of highly and lowly mentioned acknowledgees, (v) the hierarchy of the acknowledgment network, and (vi) the correlation at a paper level between intellectual similarity, measured by common references, and social similarity, measured by common acknowledges.Results show that the normative and the strategic account should be considered as valid but partial explanations of acknowledging behavior. Hence, acknowledgments should be used with extreme caution for investigating collaboration practices and they should not be used to produce acknowledgmentsbased metrics of scholars for evaluative purposes.

Science maps are visual representations of the structure and dynamics of scholarly knowl­edge. They aim to show how fields, disciplines, journals, scientists, publications, and scientific terms relate to each other. Science mapping is the body of methods and techniques that have been developed for generating science maps. This entry is an introduction to science maps and science mapping. It focuses on the conceptual, theoretical, and methodological issues of science mapping, rather than on the mathematical formulation of science mapping techniques. After a brief history of science mapping, we describe the general procedure for building a science map, presenting the data sources and the methods to select, clean, and pre-process the data. Next, we examine in detail how the most common types of science maps, namely the citation-based and the term-based, are generated. Both are based on networks: the former on the network of publications connected by citations, the latter on the network of terms co-occurring in publications. We review the rationale behind these mapping approaches, as well as the techniques and methods to build the maps (from the extraction of the network to the visualization and enrichment of the map). We also present less-common types of science maps, including co-authorship networks, interlocking editorship networks, maps based on patents’ data, and geographic maps of science. Moreover, we consider how time can be represented in science maps to investigate the dynamics of science. We also discuss some epistemological and sociological topics that can help in the interpretation, contextualization, and assessment of science maps. Then, we present some possible applications of science maps in science policy. In the conclusion, we point out why science mapping may be interesting for all the branches of meta-science, from knowl­edge organization to epistemology.

Scholars in science and technology studies and bibliometricians are increasingly revealing the performative nature of bibliometric indicators. Far from being neutral technical measures, indicators such as the Impact Factor and the h-index are deeply transforming the social and epistemic structures of contemporary science. At the same time, scholars have highlighted how bibliometric indicators are endowed with social meanings that go beyond their purely technical definitions. These social representations of bibliometric indicators are constructed and negotiated between different groups of actors within several arenas. This study aims to investigate how bibliometric indicators are used in a context, which, so far, has not yet been covered by researchers, that of daily newspapers. By a content analysis of a corpus of 583 articles that appeared in four major Italian newspapers between 1990 and 2020, we chronicle the main functions that bibliometrics and bibliometric indicators played in the Italian press. Our material shows, among other things, that the public discourse developed in newspapers creates a favorable environment for bibliometrics-centered science policies, that bibliometric indicators contribute to the social construction of scientific facts in the press, especially in science news related to medicine, and that professional bibliometric expertise struggles to be represented in newspapers and hence reach the general public.