A methodology to compute the territorial productivity of scientists: The case of Italy

Policy-makers working at the national and regional levels could find the territorial mapping of research productivity by field to be useful in informing both research and industrial policy. Research-based private companies could also use such mapping for efficient selection in localizing R&D activities and university research collaborations. In this work we apply a bibliometric methodology for ranking by research productivity: i) the fields of research for each territory (region and province); and ii) the territories for each scientific field. The analysis is based on the 2008-2012 scientific output indexed in the Web of Science, by all professors on staff at Italian universities. The population is over 36,000 professors, active in 192 fields and 9 disciplines.