Studying the impact of co-authorship with external researchers:the case of research community in Portugal using social network analysis.

Project work presented as a partial requirement to obtain a Master Degree in Information Management

Nowadays research institutions develop a significant amount of their activities financed by research grants and scholarships that sustain a constant human capital flow of temporary research labor. In this work and through the usage of Social Network Analysis we will study the impact of such policies in a Portuguese research institution. This evaluation will be applied to authorship data from papers published in international journals with refereeing covering the last twenty years of research activities involving permanent and temporary researchers from a Portuguese leading research institution in the field of telecommunications -­‐ Instituto de Telecomunicações (IT). This study compares the co-­‐authorship network and will reflect two main scenarios: a global perspective about this researchers network in terms of cohesion, and a detailed perspective about how the different subgroups are been interacting over time. Social Network Analysis will help us to understand how we can characterize their network behavior grouped by different scenarios as location, productivity and thematic groups. The paper will address the role of temporary researchers in network building and will determine the impact of their presence in this researchers network.