Looking at the skeleton of university research performance A pilot study on an Italian university

Though university research performance is very much depending on the specific structure of its collaboration patterns between internal and external colleagues, extant studies did not focus on this aspect. Aimed at filling in this gap, this pilot study investigates into the inner structure of an Italian medium-large sized university, and shows a number of features concerning university knowledge production and transfer, like the high heterogeneity of productivity and collaboration propensity among colleagues, departments and disciplinary areas, topological properties common to other kinds of socio-economic networks, and high positive collaboration between direct and indirect collaboration and impact factor. (C) 2017 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY -NC -ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).