Introduction to methods and applications to the JoREP/EUPRO database with Network Analysis approaches

The network analysis techniques are important tools to assess the performance in the European research. This statistical tool is useful to explore how the different research partners are related among them in the different transnational research programs. The networked environment provides a great opportunity to understand how these relationships are made; which are the main actors and their role into the system; and how the network operates in order to improve the European R&D system. The course will give an introduction to descriptive analysis of social network and the basics of using computer software for this purpose. The primary focus is the analysis of relational data measured on European countries. Topics include: an introduction to the main descriptive analysis of network and a short introduction to R; structural and locational properties of countries, such as centrality, density or cluster measures. Then, applications of inferential network analysis from EUPRO and JoREP datasets will be shown.
The aim is to provide to the participants with an understanding of the potential applicability of these methods to different types of networks and to various research questions related to the Europeanization processes.