The Analysis of Scientific Network of Italian Statisticians Combining Complementary Data Sources

Scientific collaboration is a complex phenomenon characterized by an intense form of interaction among scientists improving the diffusion of knowledge in the scientific community. The aim of this paper is to describe the characteristics of scientific collaboration among Italian statistician according to the results discussed for other disciplines (see Moody, 2004, Goyal et al., 2006 for social sciences and Barabasi et al., 2002, Newman, 2004 for natural sciences). Research products (scientific publications) will be considered to derive actors relationships among Italian statistician. To this aim, several data sources can be considered (from international bibliographic databases as reported in ISI web of Science or Scopus to domestic archives) but each data source presents ins and outs related to both the coverage of the population of authors and the inclusion of different kind of publication (papers in international journals, books, working papers). The goal of this paper is also to exploit the potential of integrated information to study the patterns of interactions in a research community.