Co-Authorship Networks Analysis to Discover Collaboration Patterns among Italian Researchers

The study of the behaviors of large community of researchers and what correlations exist between their environment, such as grouping rules by law or specific institution policies, and their performance is an important topic since it affects the metrics used to evaluate the quality of the research. Moreover, in several countries, such as Italy, these metrics are also used to define the recruitment and funding policies. To effectively study these topics, we created a procedure that allow us to craft a large dataset of Italian Academic researchers, having the most important performance indices together with co-authorships information, mixing data extracted from the official list of academic researchers provided by Italian Ministry of University and Research and the Elsevier’s Scopus database. In this paper, we discuss our approach to automate the process of correct association of profiles and the mapping of publications reducing the use of computational resources. We also present the characteristics of four datasets related to specific research fields defined by the Italian Ministry of University and Research used to group the Italian researchers. Then, we present several examples of how the information extracted from these datasets can help to achieve a better understanding of the dynamics influencing scientist performances.