Scientific Context Without ignoring the existence of a large array of scientific perspectives about the measurement of science productions and science dynamics, we situate our work in the branch of analysis and visualization of social networks. This fiel d - as well as indicators definition - has been an important step forward for the evaluation and policy of science (Callon et al., 1986; Law et al., 1988). Within this tradition of analyzing free - associations in relation to Actor - Network - Theory, t he underst anding of scientific collaboration s had supposed consequent methodological and ethical requirement . This is still very much at stake today in a momentum when the data about scientific activities are continually growing , while the heterogeneity of scientifi c activities is still important despite many attend to rationalize, measure and evaluate its quality and performativity. Besides the necessity of evaluating the performance of normal science and technological creativity, there are many signs of an on - goin g critical self - evaluation of the reliability of science indicators (Barré, 2001; Freeman Soete, 2008). In this trend, characterizing and mapping collaboration appears to become a compulsory instrument both for scholars and decision makers, but also for re searchers ( Noyons, 2001; Heimerik et al., 2003 ; Van Den Besselaar et al., 2006 ). This situation still echoes what Zitt and Bassecoular (2008) had identified under three main challenges for scientometrics and for the relations between those who study scien ce and technology production and those who create knowledge and techniques: (1) the quality of accountability of knowledge dynamics within various source of data , (2) the necessity to characterize dynamics as well as evaluating positions and (3) the common problem of diversity. In our view the interplay of those challenges, evoked almost 10 years ago, points the need to encourage characterization of knowledge an d technological dynamics at the heart of the sociability of scientific activities, says research collaboration. We would like to follow here Beaver’s recomme ndation , wh ich proposed to consider c ollaboration in research as « standing somewhere between the context of discovery and the context of justification » (Beaver, 2004, p. 402). Since, the nexus of those collaborations are taking place in research project s most of time, the node of this area of enquiry remains the funded research project.