Data cleaning and enrichment through data integration: networking the Italian academia

We describe a bibliometric network characterizing co-authorship
collaborations in the entire Italian academic community. The network,
consisting of 38,220 nodes and 507,050 edges, is built upon two distinct
data sources: faculty information provided by the Italian Ministry of
University and Research and publications available in Semantic Scholar.
Both nodes and edges are associated with a large variety of semantic data,
including gender, bibliometric indexes, authors' and
publications' research fields, and temporal information. While
linking data between the two original sources posed many challenges, the
network has been carefully validated to assess its reliability and to
understand its graph-theoretic characteristics. By resembling several
features of social networks, our dataset can be profitably leveraged in
experimental studies in the wide social network analytics domain as well
as in more specific bibliometric contexts.