Evaluating the Quality of Legal Scholarship in Italy: Two Investigations on Peer Review

The described Italian surveys on legal monographs and periodicals provide a framework which empirically confirms the state of the Italian debate on the evaluation of scientific legal outputs. Italian legal scholars evaluate the quality of their scientific production using qualitative methods rather than bibliometric. Under the influence of the exact sciences,they are now encouraged to follow the evaluation model used for such sciences. However, this process is not obvious. It is possible to affirm, based upon the answers to the two surveys and the Italian and foreign literature, that the assessment of the quality of research in legal sciences must take into account a number of important factors.Quality indicators should not be imposed upon legal scholars from a top down perspective,Moreover it is necessary to think of a quality assessment of the results more transparent and comparable at the international level.