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
  • Elected member of the Council of the School of Human and Social Sciences, University of Naples Federico II, representing the 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 Social and Statistical Sciences 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
  • Coordinator of the University and Work: Data Analysis and Digital Economy placement days, which bring graduates of the Data Scientist for Economics and Business track together with companies such as Accenture, Deloitte, Indra and Altea
  • 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 Academic Board of the Ph.D. Programme in Economics at the University of Naples Federico II
  • Coordinator of the Why I Study Economics days (2015–2025), organised annually by the Department, with the award of the Simona Balbi, Lilli Basile and Mario Morgano prizes
  • 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 260 scientific publications indexed by Google Scholar, of which 38 articles are rated “A” (top tier) by the Italian Agency of University Research Evaluation (ANVUR).

Total citations: 32,900 · H-Index: 45 · i10-Index: 124 · Last 5 years: 28,000 citations (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 — 24,800+ citations on Google Scholar — and one of its top-downloaded articles.

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)
  • INTENSE — INtegrated Technologies and ENhanced SEnsing for cognition and rehabilitation, MIMIT Innovation Agreements. Role: Senior Researcher (2023–2026)
  • 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. 1,610,000+ 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)
  • Courses taught at other universities: Basilicata, Magna Græcia of Catanzaro, and the Italian Air Force Officers’ Academy
  • 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