Both in water management and in research policy there is a call for more integrative approaches to tackle large societal challenges. This requires collaboration in networks of actors with different institutional and geographical backgrounds. However, our understanding of the European water research network is limited. Applying social network analysis to data from projects in Framework Programmes 1 to 7, we identify central actors in the network and explore their institutional and geographical characteristics. Compared to the generic research network arising from all projects in the Framework Programmes, the water research network turns out to consist of organisations that are geographically more diverse and more equally distributed across different organisation types. Although the diversity of the network has increased over time, the traditional knowledge producers, higher education organisations and publicly-funded research organisations from the EU15, have kept their position in the network centre over time, resulting in a stable core since the 1980s.@en

The idea of constructing science maps based on bibliographic data has intrigued researchers for decades, and various techniques have been developed to map the structure of research disciplines. Most science mapping studies use a single method. However, as research fields have various properties, a valid map of a field should actually be composed of a set of maps derived from a series of investigations using different methods. That leads to the question of what can be learned from a combination-triangulation-of these different science maps. In this paper we propose a method for triangulation, using the example of water science. We combine three different mapping approaches: journal-journal citation relations (JJCR), shared author keywords (SAK), and title word-cited reference co-occurrence (TWRC). Our results demonstrate that triangulation of JJCR, SAK, and TWRC produces a more comprehensive picture than each method applied individually. The outcomes from the three different approaches can be associated with each other and systematically interpreted to provide insights into the complex multidisciplinary structure of the field of water research.

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