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The Italian public-owned Academic Medical Centers (AMCs) are hospitals where the activities of scientific research, teaching, and patients care are fully integrated. AMCs have an enormous impact on society and country health. Recently, policymakers and practitioners give more and more great importance to the AMCs’ scientific activity for both welfare and national competitivity. The scientific production and its impact on the research community could be obviously affected by different factors related to the structural and operational characteristics of each AMC. Healthcare institutions could be different for the typology of services that they offer, their geolocation, the presence/absence of Emergency Departments, the number of employees, and so forth. In this sense, our study aims to investigate and determine which are the possible factors impacting the research productivity of AMCs. We develop a model to assess the academic value of AMCs by taking into account these factors and how they are related to healthcare performance, measured in terms of scientific production (e.g. scientific publications) and impact on the research field (e.g. citations). To face this issue, for each of the public AMCs we collect data about research productivity from bibliographic indexing databases (e.g. Web of Science, PubMed) and we retrieve structural information mainly from their official websites. This work has been partially financed by the research project “Leading Change in Academic Medical Centers”, funded by the competitive call for projects V:ALERE 2019. The project aims to provide evidence, advice, and remarks to help the agents of the public health system to address the many challenges that they face.

This paper has been developed in the frame of the research project “V:ALERE 2019” focused on Italian public-owned Academic Medical Centers. The main aim of the project is to provide evidence, advice, and remarks to help the agents of the public health system to address the many challenges that they face. In recent years, there is an increasing recognition of the potential value of research evidence as one of the many factors considered by policymakers and practitioners. Even more, in the case of medical science, the analysis of research and its impact is indispensable, in light of its implications for public health. The starting point for mapping a research area is to review the related scientific literature because by synthesizing past research findings, it is possible to effectively use the existing knowledge base and advance lines of future researches. In this sense, bibliometrics becomes useful, by providing a structured analysis to a large body of information, to infer trends over time, themes researched, and to show the “big picture” of extant research. In particular, in this work, we focus our attention on the scientific production of the last 20 years of the Scientific Institutes for Research, Hospitalization, and Healthcare (IRCCS “Istituto di Ricovero e Cura a Carattere Scientifico”) specialized in the oncology research. IRCCS are biomedical institutions of relevant national interest that drive clinical assistance in strong relation to research activities. They are committed to being a benchmark for the whole public health system for both the quality of patient care and the innovation skills in the field of the organization. All the analyses were carried out by using the Bibliometrix, an open-source tool for quantitative research in scientometrics and bibliometrics that includes all the main bibliometric methods of analysis.