  It has recently been claimed by Baccini and coauthors that due to ANVUR's
bibliometric evaluations of individuals, departments, and universities, in
Italy there has been a surge in self-citations in the last ten years, thus
increasing the "inwardness" of Italian research more than has happened abroad.
We have studied the database of Ioannidis et al. published on 12 August 2019 of
the one hundred thousand most "highly cited" scientists, including about two
thousand Italians, and we found that the problem of self-citations in relation
to this scientific elite is not significant in Italy, while perhaps observing a
small deviation in the low scores in the rankings. The effect indicated by
Baccini et al. consequently, does not seem worrying for the scientific elite
(we quantified it in 2 percent of the total of scientists of the "best" one
hundred thousand), and is probably largely concentrated in the further less
cited scientists. Evaluation agencies like ANVUR should probably exclude
self-citations in future evaluations, for the noise introduced by the young
researchers. The overall state of health of the Italian research system and the
positive effect of the ANVUR assessments are demonstrated by the number of
Italian researchers in the top one hundred thousand, which has increased by
comparing the "career" databased of 22 years, with that of the "young"
researchers in the "2017" database. Italy, looking at the elite researchers,
not only is not the most indulgent in self-citations, but has shown the best
improvements, proving that the introduction of ANVUR had a positive effect.
Indeed, all countries apart from Italy have suffered a decline, even
substantial (-20 percent on a national Japan scale), of the number of
researchers present in the 2017 data sets compared to career data. Italy
instead shows a +0.2 percent on a global basis and an impressive +11.53 percent
on a national basis.
