The BiblioPref project

The BiblioPref project, financed by the Italian Ministry of Research (PRIN 2022 program), aims at

deepening our understanding of the effectiveness and methodological issues of scientific publishing evaluation,
providing a novel indicator, , of journal quality, based on scholars’ evaluations rather than on citations,
explore methodological issues related to the aggregation of individual preferences expressed as rankings.

Three units are involved in the project:

Catholic University of the Sacred Heart, Milan: Giovanni Ursino, PI (CUP J53D23004410008)
University of Pisa: Mauro Sylos Labini, local PI, and Pietro Battiston (CUP I53D23002650006)
University of Parma: Marco Magnani, local PI (CUP I53D23002640001)

Results/output

[as of September 2025]

The PeerRank indicator
Work is ongoing by the Pisa and Milan units for the implementation of the smart survey that will provide the data required to build the indicator. The web services are close to completion, with the communication, diffusion and graphics tasks under active development.
Empirical analysis of strategic voting
Marco Magnani (Parma ), Luca Rossi (Parma ) and Pietro Battiston (Pisa ), together with Dimitri Paolini (University of Sassari) have run an empirical analysis of strategic voting with the Borda count, focusing on the context of the Eurovision Song Contest. The results are reported in the working paper “Country Music: Positional Voting and Strategic Behavior“, and were already presented at several international conferences.
Strategic proofness of positional voting
Pietro Battiston (Pisa ) and Giovanni Ursino (Milan ) are proposing and analyzing a new property of welfare functions (voting systems where rankings expressed by individuals result in an aggregated ranking) that guarantees the practical unfeasibility of strategic voting. Preliminary results will be presented at the 2025 Annual Meeting of The Association of Southern European Economic Theorists (ASSET) in Rabat, Morocco, from October 30 to November 1, 2025.