ABSTRACT
Introduction A co-authorship network of scientists at a university is an archetypical example of a complex evolving network. Collaborative R&D networks are self-organized products of partner choice between scientists. Various theoretical frameworks have been used to describe recent academic research. Though these frameworks differ in many respects, they all point to a more collaborative R&D ‘network mode’ of knowledge production. Concepts such as ‘Mode 2’ (Gibbons et al. 1994), ‘Academic Capitalism’ (Slaughter and Leslie 1997), ‘Post-Academic Science’ (Ziman 2000), or the ‘Triple Helix’ (Etzkowitz and Leydesdorff 2000) not only refer to external collaborations of universities with industry, government and other actors, but report changed practices inside academia. In universities, the isolated researcher in the ivory tower has been widely replaced by interdisciplinary teams in collaborative research projects (Wuchty et al. 2007). Crossovers and co-operations between different scientific disciplines, different organizational units, and external actors are common and increasing phenomena of academic reality (Guimerà et al. 2005). Since collaborative research has become the dominant and most promising way to produce highquality output (Jones et al. 2008), collaboration structures are also a target for research and management design (Bozeman and Lee 2005). Collaborative research projects, co-authored publications, or multidisciplinary excellence networks in universities point to the peer network mode of today’s knowledge production. Our study measures these outputs by looking at co-publications between different organizational units of University College Dublin (UCD). With this, we try to reconstruct the interdisciplinary publication culture inside this university. The study is set up as an academic research project but is intended to contribute to the self-monitoring mechanisms of UCD as well. We assume that demand from academic management for consultancy will grow due to rising legitimatory needs. Therefore it is important to embed network analysis in a methodological and ethical-regulatory context to evaluate its applicability.
