As Rector I will always "watch" to ensure that research is carried out with scientific rigor and in complete freedom; when I stop being Rector, as a researcher I will "work" with the awareness that research is carried out with scientific rigor and in complete freedom; when I stop working for the university, as a citizen I will "fight" to ensure that research is carried out in the universities with scientific rigor and in complete freedom; and this is not to defend the autonomy of research but for the independence of research.
I speak on the recent publication of the thirtieth CRENoS report recently presented and which had an important echo on the regional information bodies. I want to immediately clear the field of controversy. I will not go into the assessments of health or budget or transport policies in Sardinia over the past twenty years. I believe that the discussion tables to do this operation are other and with more actresses and actors.
Instead, I will focus on the research activity and its results. The very first things I learned at the beginning of my career as a researcher, therefore as a PhD student - and I had the pleasure of verifying this even outside our national context - is that there is a difference between two aspects of research: the "result" and the "methodology" of producing the result". The result is the data that is used and commented on, the methodology is rigorously chosen with an accurate analysis so that it gives guarantees on the reliability of the result.
Let's start from this second aspect, from the method, for convenience. Evaluating the methodologies first of all means ascertaining the data sources, who produced them - for example whether they were produced by a certified body or not -, how they were produced, the temporal dimension and the elements that could possibly disturb the production of that given.
In the case of the CRENoS report, it seems clear to me that the methodology is robust and rigorous: the data are the result of an ISTAT research (certified institute that follows extremely rigorous robustness procedures and which provides official data for the country and Europe) presented to the Parliament. by the Institute itself and have been taken up by the CRENoS researchers. In this process, the methodologies that are applied are not the result of an extemporaneous imaginative vivacity of male and female researchers, but derive from consolidated and "evaluated" practices by the international scientific community in the appropriate fora (scientific congresses, publications, review processes and anonymous evaluation and scientifically rigorous by the international scientific community.
