# D. De Stefano and L. Kronegger and V. Leone Sciabolazza and M. P. Vitale and S. Zaccarin, Social Network tools for the evaluation of individual and group scientific performance [Selected for D.Checchi, T. Jappelli, A.F. Uricchio (eds.), Teaching, Research and Academic Careers]

Over the last decades, scientific collaboration has been widely considered an important driver of research innovation. By collaborating, scientists can benefit by both methodological and technological complementarities and synergy, improving the quality and quantity of their research output. As evidence, collaboration among scientists is increasing in all disciplines and government policies in international exchange programs aimed at promoting the collaborative network among researchers. Collaboration among scientists can be represented as a network, usually adopting co-authorship as linkages. In this view, Social Network Analysis (SNA) provides a useful theoretical and methodological approach to the study of collaboration among scientists since collaboration features can be related to the topological characteristics of the network. Recently, several empirical studies found positive correlations between researchers’ position in the co-authorship network and their productivity although results can be different by the disciplines, scientific performance measures, and data sources retrieved to construct the co-authorship networks. In this contribution, we propose the use of SNA tools for scientific evaluation purposes. Network indices at individual and subgroup level will be introduced to analyze relation with both the individual research productivity and scientific output quality measured on bibliographic information provided by the individual academic researchers involved in the evaluation exercise VQR from the period 2011-2014.