Evaluating the Quality of Legal Scholarship in Italy: Two Investigations on Peer Review

Two research studies have been carried out, both of which provided significant results concerning the evaluation of legal scholarship in Italy. The first study was conducted by the Institute of Legal Information Theory and Techniques of the National Research Council (ITTIG) on the assessment of legal research monographs in Italy (3). TheProject's objective was to check both the possibility and opportunity to identify bibliometric indicators that can support the peer review process. A structured questionnaire was sent to 4,729 professors and researchers of Italian universities, identified using the public database of the Ministry of Education, Universities and Research (MIUR). Scholars belong to the 21 subject areas which make up the area of legal sciences. 4,645 invitations to participate have been sent via email. The invitations have arrived to 4,501 respondents (target population) representing95.2 % of the workforce resulting in the Ministry database. The questionnaire was made available online for three months and a total of 1,241 answers were received, representing about 26 % of the target population.The second study, a survey on evaluation process of legal journals identified as A rated journals,fits precisely in this panorama. This survey, always conducted by ITTIG in the second semester of the 2017 until March 2018, was focused on the peer review process and evaluation criteria indicated in the most important Italian legal journals.