Bibliometrics and research evaluation: what's in for the librarian?

Research evaluation in European universities has a long history of fatal attraction to bibliometrics, most notably citation analysis, by virtue of its supposed ability to provide objective indicators of scientific quality. Extensive bibliometric analyses involving collective entities (research groups, institutions, nations) are usually carried out either by scientometric scholars in the process of validating their theoretical constructs or by trained personnel during national research assessment exercises. When it comes to the evaluation of individual performance for academic promotion or funding, however, researchers willing to supply bibliometric evidence of their impact are on their own unless they turn to the local library for assistance. A case study inspired by the Italian Ministerial Decree n. 89/2009 on the recruitment of University researchers will be used to discuss: a) the potential pitfalls lurking behind the definition of a core set of indicators; b) the difficulty to get a "true" citation score from the three huge interdisciplinary databases currently available for such purpose: ISI Web of Science, Scopus, and Google Scholar