An analysis of the most recent national workshops on Italian population studies accordingtTo a network perspective

Laura Terzera, Università Milano, Bicocca
Giulia Rivellini, Università Cattolica, Milan

The scientific community organises its relationships into network patterns, where the nodes are individuals (scientists) and the links are acquaintance and common work, usually presented at workshops and conferences and/or published in books and scientific journals. In Italy every two years is organized a national workshop on population studies delivered by Italian scientists. Using the abstract collection of the last four meeting (1999, 2001, 2003, 2005) we created a data-set merging information on the single scientific work (numbers of authors, topic, methodology used, data source) and on the authors (gender, academic position, scientific group, or kind of institution if different from the university). In this paper, the properties of the demographers’ network are evaluated, with the aim of identifying factors which may influence collaborative relations among authors and the grade of interdisciplinarity between the Italian scholars. The whole data-set allow us to compare science network dynamics in a four-wave study.