Co-authorship networks and research impact in large research facilities: benchmarking internal reports and bibliometric databases

In this paper, we address the main differences of the scientific production between internal and external researcher groups of a synchrotron radiation facility. Through the construction and analysis of their co-authorship networks, we could see the structural variations in the way these two different kinds of research groups collaborate. We also evaluated the scientific impact of each group and found surprising similarities, which led us to create two hypotheses that might contribute to the comprehension of the scientific assessment of large-scale research facilities. We found that, as the review criteria the studied synchrotron adopts to select external scientific projects is very effective; the quality of the external research is at least as good as the internal. Therefore, evaluating the internal scientific output appears to be an appropriate representation of the impact of the whole laboratory.