The relationship between network ranking and research performance: an application to the Italian national council of research

Considering the Italian National Research Council (CNR), this study
aims at analysing whether relationships between researchers from different
scientific institutions affect the quality of scientific outputs. On the one hand,
authors applied a directional output distance function (DODF) to measure
internal performances of research institutes. Authors consider two different
kinds of scientific outputs, assuming some outputs more important than others,
as well as established by the last CNR reform. On the other hand, in order to
evaluate collaborations among CNR institutes, as well as between CNR
institutes and universities, a network analysis has been applied with the aim of
measuring relationships among researchers. In this case, research institutes are
seen as nodes of the internal collaboration network. In this paper, authors used
data of scientific publications related to all institutes of CNR for the 2007 year
and they asked to the question whether best researchers in terms of publications
are those that collaborate more.