  The response by Benedetto, Checchi, Graziosi & Malgarini (2017) (hereafter
"BCG&M"), past and current members of the Italian Agency for Evaluation of
University and Research Systems (ANVUR), to Franceschini and Maisano's ("F&M")
article (2017), inevitably draws us into the debate. BCG&M in fact complain
"that almost all criticisms to the evaluation procedures adopted in the two
Italian research assessments VQR 2004-2010 and 2011-2014 limit themselves to
criticize the procedures without proposing anything new and more apt to the
scope". Since it is us who raised most criticisms in the literature, we welcome
this opportunity to retrace our vainly "constructive" recommendations, made
with the hope of contributing to assessments of the Italian research system
more in line with the state of the art in scientometrics. We see it as equally
interesting to confront the problem of the failure of knowledge transfer from
R&D (scholars) to engineering and production (ANVUR's practitioners) in the
Italian VQRs. We will provide a few notes to help the reader understand the
context for this failure. We hope that these, together with our more specific
comments, will also assist in communicating the reasons for the level of
scientometric competence expressed in BCG&M's heated response to F&M's
criticism.
