Evaluating Research: the Case of Legal Scholarly Outputs

Scientific scholarly communication is subject to selection rules. In recent years, the issues around the assessment of research results has assumed a central role in academia. Despite recent efforts, by several initiatives both at national and international level, and the adoption of guidelines that emerged from the evaluation of research programs at European level, the measurement and evaluation of the quality of research still faces strong opposition from all bibliometric areas, in which the instruments available (amount of citations identified, the impact factor, and so on) are not appropriate to the humanities and social sciences. In particular, specific attention is paid today to the role of the book, which is a fundamental resource in the processes of scientific scholarly communication. In this regard this paper, written by Ginevra Peruginelli, analyses the missing link between the indicators and legal scholars' notions of quality, with reference to the role of the monograph in legal science.