Analysis of publication quality in a cancer research institute

The paper presents an experimental method for the evaluation of scientific papers in the field of oncology and related disciplines developed at the National Institute for Cancer Research (IST), Genoa, Italy. The method is based on the partitioning of categories of the Science Citation Index-Journal Citation Reports (SCI-JCR) into deciles, thus normalizing Impact Factor (IF), in order to guage the quality of the productivity. A second parameter related to the number of staff of each department co-authoring a given paper has been introduced for the allocation of Institute funding. The following studies have been carried to compare the assigned score and the average number of citations of papers published by a research group. The identification of correctives is in progress. The method provides a basis for a possible method to judge the quality of publications from within a research organization, and should be reproducible independently of the disciplines considered.