The educational institutions need to have a clear mission, comprehensive vision and attainable objectives that can be interpreted and analyzed by us ing terms of strategic planning. Our work is part of prototype system that supports academic evaluation and decision - making strategi es concerning the research policy of an institute , using visual analytics . It focus es on the analys i s and visualization of t he relationships that exist between authors, scientific publications and research fields , within an academic unit . Using , initially , the research field as a filter we create a co – authoring network of authors connected to each other through weighted assoc iations . W eight values are produced by applying more than one algorithm to ke y attributes of the publications (citation, publisher , etc. ) and characterize the connections (edges) of the network. The graph nodes represent authors ( researchers ) with their at tributes. Our data is enriched by analys i s and metrics of the graph. The online use of successive vectors of thresholds in the characteristics of the graph enables user s to get a “visual multi - criteria analys i s” for the validation of the main hypotheses of institutional research policies and the support of further decision making