Social Network Analysis as a Tool to Evaluate the Effectiveness of EC Funded Networks of Excellence: The Case of DEMO-net

The European Commission, through its framework programme aims to stimulate the development of sustained collaborative research networks across Europe. Social network analysis (SNA) has previously been used to evaluate collaboration between projects at a European level. In this study SNA was used to evaluate the nature of the relationship between researchers at network startup, roles subsequently allocated to them, and network configuration. A correlation was found between centrality at startup and subsequent role allocation. Indegree/outdegree analysis provided some indication of this but greater insight was found from examining network partitions and n-cliques.