Improving Co-authorship Network Structures by Combining Heterogeneous Data Sources

The present paper aims at describing the scientific collaboration patterns of the Italian academic statisticians by merging bibliographic data from heterogenous sources–ISI-WoS, Current Index to Statistics, and the database of nationally funded research projects, PRIN. To obtain a unified database, containing both top international as well as nationally oriented production, information were com- bined by identifying and linking duplicate records, i.e. record linkage. The unique co-authorship network was then used as basis for network analysis.