Looking at the skeleton of university research performance

Abstract

Though university research performance is likely very much depending on the specific structure of its collaboration patterns between internal and external colleagues, extant studies did not focus on this aspect. Aimed at filling in this gap, this pilot study investigates into the inner structure of an Italian medium-sized university, and shows a number of interesting features concerning university knowledge production, like the high heterogeneity of collaboration propensity among colleagues, departments and disciplinary areas, the similarity with other kinds of social networks, and the structuration in a sort of “three sub-universities”.