Curriculum Vitae

Massimo Aria — Full Professor of Statistics for Social Sciences

Curriculum Vitae · Massimo Aria

An overview of my education, academic positions, research leadership, scientific production, and teaching activities.

Education

  • Ph.D. in Computational Statistics and Applications — University of Naples Federico II, 2004. Dissertation on the development of a general methodological and applied framework for classification and regression trees (CART).
  • Laurea cum laude in Economics — University of Naples Federico II, 2000.

Academic Positions

  • Full Professor, Statistics for Social Sciences (SECS-S/05), University of Naples Federico II — 2019 – present
  • Associate Professor, Statistics for Social Sciences, University of Naples Federico II — 2014 – 2019
  • Assistant Professor, Statistics for Social Sciences, University of Naples Federico II — 2007 – 2014
  • Post-doctoral Research Fellow, Federico II / CRC Transport — 2004 – 2005

Research Leadership

  • Co-founder, K-Synth srl — Academic spin-off specialised in knowledge extraction and intelligence from large-scale heterogeneous data (2021–present)
  • Co-coordinator, PMP Lab — Performance Measurement & Management in Professions, Dept. of Economics and Statistics, Federico II (2019–present)
  • Coordinator, Bibliometrics & Science Mapping Research Group — Federico II & Univ. L. Vanvitelli (2010–present). www.bibliometrix.org

Institutional Roles

Ongoing Roles

  • Member of the Executive Board, Department of Economics and Statistics
  • Member of the Research Committee, Department of Economics and Statistics
  • Responsible for the Research Quality Assessment (VQR), Department of Economics and Statistics
  • Member of the Academic Board of the Ph.D. Programme in Economics at the University of Naples Federico II
  • Board member of the Master’s degree in Data Science and in Economics (curriculum: Data Scientist for Economics) since 2019
  • Scientific coordinator for the Department in the following University-wide Task Forces:
    • Industry 4.0 and Sustainable Development
    • SUM (Smart and Sustainable Mobility)
    • Human & Future
  • Scientific coordinator of the IT laboratories of the Department of Economics and Statistics

Past Roles

  • Board member for over 20 years of the Ph.D. programs in Computational Statistics and Social Sciences and Statistics
  • Member of the core design team for the new Master’s Degree Programme in Data Science at the University of Naples Federico II
  • Served as Researchers’ Representative on the Faculty Council (2007–2011)

Scientific Results & Impact

Author of over 200 scientific articles published in international journals, of which 38 rated “A” (top tier) by the Italian Agency of University Research Evaluation (ANVUR).

Total citations: 26,100 · H-Index: 43 · Last 5 years: 23,200 citations, H-Index 38 (Google Scholar).

The 2017 paper “bibliometrix: An R-tool for comprehensive science mapping analysis” (Journal of Informetrics) is the most-cited article ever published in the journal (Scopus: 10,300+; Google Scholar: 19,100+ citations) and a top-downloaded article.

Research Interests

My research activities span a wide range of areas in computational and applied statistics, with a strong focus on methodological development and empirical applications. In particular:

  • Bibliometrics & Science Mapping — Statistical techniques for analysing publication patterns, impact assessment, and systematic literature reviews
  • Text Mining and NLP — Corpus analysis of scientific literature and textual datasets
  • Machine Learning — Tree-based models, ensemble methods, neural networks, clustering, and factorial methods
  • Missing Data Imputation — Recursive, incremental algorithms for imputing missing values in qualitative and quantitative data
  • Computational Statistics — Development of estimation algorithms and numerical procedures
  • Statistical Survey Design — Design and execution of socio-economic surveys and customer-satisfaction studies

Research Projects

  • PRIN 2022 — SciK-Health: Mapping Scientific Knowledge about health for decision-making. Role: Principal Investigator (2023–2025)
  • PRIN 2022 PNRR — Scientific production for patient care in Academic Health Science Centres. Role: Local Scientific Coordinator (2023–2025)
  • PNC Digital Health — WP2 PI. PNRR-funded ecosystem (2023–2025)
  • PI, local PI, or senior researcher in:
    • 5 EU-funded projects (incl. H2020 MAGIC, ERC AdG RoDyMan)
    • 3 PNRR projects
    • 3 PRIN projects
    • 1 FIRB project
    • 11+ national and regional research initiatives

Scientific Software

  • Bibliometrix & Biblioshiny — R package and web-app for comprehensive science mapping and bibliometric analysis. 1,350,000+ installations; 200+ community video tutorials
  • TALL — Text Analysis for All — R/Shiny app for NLP: text mining, topic modelling, sentiment analysis
  • E2Tree — Explainable Ensemble Trees: interpreting Random Forest and XGBoost models via single tree-like structures
  • contentanalysis — Tools for extracting and analysing scientific content from PDFs, including citation extraction and reference matching
  • openalexR — R client for the OpenAlex API, facilitating access to open bibliographic metadata for scholarly publications
  • DimensionsR — R interface to the Dimensions API for bibliometric data extraction and analysis
  • PubmedR — R interface to the PubMed API for literature retrieval and analysis
  • PLS-SEM Matlab Toolbox — Matlab/Octave package for Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Models

Teaching Experience

  • Courses taught (BSc, MSc, Ph.D.):
    • Quantitative Methods and Data Analysis
    • Sampling Surveys
    • Statistical Methods for Evaluation
    • Machine Learning Laboratory in R
    • Bibliometric Analysis using R (Ph.D. and Summer Schools)
  • Faculty member of the European Summer School of Scientometrics (ESSS)
  • Scientific Coordinator of the Summer School in Science Mapping (SSSM)
  • 60+ invited seminars at doctoral schools across Europe
  • Supervisor of 150+ MSc theses and multiple Ph.D. dissertations

Editorial and Scientific Activities

  • Section Editor in Chief, American Journal of Oral Medicine (Statistics)
  • Associate Editor, Journal of Oral Pathology and Medicine (Wiley)
  • Editorial Board, Nature Scientific Reports, Sustainability
  • Reviewer for 30+ journals including Scientometrics, Journal of Informetrics, EJOR, CSDA, Expert Systems with Applications, Health Policy, The R Journal
  • Member of the Scientific Committee of the ERCIM Working Group on Computational and Methodological Statistics

Scientific Societies

  • International Statistical Institute (ISI)
  • International Association for Statistical Computing (IASC)
  • Società Italiana di Statistica (SIS)
  • Associazione di Statistica Applicata (ASA)
  • Associazione Italiana Studi di Popolazione (AISP)

Languages

  • Italian — Native
  • English — Fluent (academic and professional proficiency)

Technical Skills

  • Programming — R (primary), Matlab, Python, C++
  • Tools — LaTeX, Git, Quarto, SPSS, SAS
  • Frameworks — RStudio, Shiny, Positron, Plotly
  • Reproducible Research — Quarto, RMarkdown, version-controlled workflows