Assessing national strengths and weaknesses in research fields

National policies aimed at fostering the effectiveness of scientific systems should be based on reliable strategic analysis identifying strengths and weaknesses at field level. Approaches and indicators thus far proposed in the literature have not been completely satisfactory, since they fail to distinguish the effect of the size of production factors from that of their quality, particularly the quality of labor. The current work proposes an innovative "input-oriented" approach, which permits: (i) estimation of national research performance in a field and comparison to that of other nations, independent of the size of their respective research staffs; and, for fields of comparable intensity of publication, (ii) identification of the strong and weak research fields within a national research system on the basis of international comparison. In reference to the second objective, the proposed approach is applied to the Italian case, through the analysis of the 2006-2010 scientific production of the Italian academic system, in the 200 research fields where bibliometric analysis is meaningful. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.