  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.
