The understanding of the causes that influence how researchers articulate and build their scientific collaboration networks is still an open question in academic research. Of fundamental importance for the development of new indicators and methods of evaluation of scientific literature, the concept of social networking helps operate new levels of analysis, contributing their structural and dynamic aspects to the study of causal mechanisms and triggers that lead to the formation of these networks of scientific collaboration. Obtaining attributes of individual researchers, data on the constitution of networks over time and mode of disambiguation of the names that make up these collaboration networks have been the main challenges in the area of research networks. The purpose of this article is to describe how we designed a way to study a university’s collaboration networks, focusing on the University of São Paulo, and identifying their key strategies, connectivity and causal mechanisms, as well as finding links between their networks and different levels of participants’ productivity. It should be noted that this article only describes the research questions and how to treat them, leaving their implementation to the next steps of this research. The database used for analysis was the Institutional Scientific Production being developed by Sibi/USP, which collects articles published by members of the university indexed in national and international databases such as Scielo, Web of Science and BioMed, as well as an institutional database to obtain the individual attributes of the researchers participating in these networks.