Comparing fields of sciences: multilevel networks of research collaborations in Italian academia

Much of the work in the sociology of science observes scientific communities from a micro perspective, focusing on interactions in laboratories. In doing so, they try to uncover the impact of social and cultural norms in the everyday production of scientific results. Other studies approach the topic from a macro perspective, analysing scientific organizations and the reciprocal influence they have with wider society. Less attention has been paid to the meso level of interactions within and between scientists and the environments they work in. Methodologically, the gap in the literature can be filled by the recent advancements in multilevel analytical approaches, especially by the combination of statistical multilevel analysis with social network analysis. This combination allows to model structural effects on individual behaviours, where these effects are at work at different levels of social interactions being it between individuals, disciplines, organizations. The paper adopts the structural approach of Lazega et al. (2008) and analyses the local system of public funding to academic disciplines in Italy using bipartite networks. Such analysis has been already done for the two academic areas of physics (Bellotti 2012) and philosophy (Bellotti 2014). Here we extend the analysis to all the areas of research in Italian Academia, in order to compare the results across different scientific fields. By doing this, we observe the variability of structural effects across disciplinary areas, that we expect to be organized in different but comparable ways. In particular, previous analysis of physicists and philosophers showed in both cases the overarching importance of academic ranks and of brokerage roles in obtaining research funding, together with some other interesting effects, like the less impacting but still significant importance of working with a long term established group of colleagues, and the advantages of working on specific sub-disciplines (Bellotti 2012 and 2014). Here we want to see if these results replicate across other disciplinary areas, and/or some interesting differences can be found. For this purposes, we analyse 12 years (1999 - 2011) of the Italian Ministry of University and Research funding of Projects of National Interest (Prin) in all the disciplinary areas of academia. The micro (collaborations between scientists), macro (collaborations between institutions and between disciplines) and meso level (the combination of network measures at a micro and macro level) of interactions are firstly independently analysed, and results are used to model the total amount of money researchers have received over the 12 years against the variables that meaningfully describe the network structures of collaborations to research projects.