An integrated dataset providing a landscape of the Italian Universities

We provide data describing all the largest Italian Universities from several perspectives, including scientific research, administrative and economic point of view. In particular, associated with each University, we have the following data. (a) The list of the most representative research keywords (single words and bigrams), automatically extracted from titles, abstracts and other possible metadata of all the research publications available for that University in Scopus database at October 2022. (b) The Extended_name of the University, Status, University_Type, State_status, number of Managerial and Administrative Staff, Teaching Staff and Researchers, Phd Diplomas, Phd Enrollments, Enrolled Undergraduates, Enrolled Graduates, Graduates, Master I Lv Graduates, Enrolled Master's Degree I Lv, Master II Lv, Graduates Enrolled, Master II Lv, Graduates Specialistic Schools and Enrolled Specialistic Schools were extracted from USTAT database for the years 2016–2018. (c) The data of Educational Income, Income from Commissioned Research and Technology Transfer, Income from Research with competitive funding, Own Income, Contributions from others (private), Contributions from others (public), Contributions from universities, Contributions from the European Union and the Rest of the World, Contributions from other local governments, Contributions Regions and Autonomous Provinces, MIUR and other central government grants, Operating Costs, Current Management Costs, Managerial and administrative personnel costs, Research and teaching staff cost, Cost of Lecturers and Researchers, Cost Scientific Collaborators, Cost of Contract Teachers, Cost of Language Experts, Other research and teaching personnel costs, Personnel Costs, Scientific equipment, Concessions, licenses and trademarks, Patent rights are extracted from the unique University Balance Sheet of each university for the years 2016–2018. These data were of difficult availability; they have been extracted from several heterogeneous sources and have been automatically checked, cleaned from errors, integrated, and missing values have been imputed as much as possible. However, due to large missing portions in the sources, they still contain several missing parts. Nonetheless, they represent a powerful snapshot of the Italian Universities, and can be of interest to researchers for many analyses of the Italian academic world. All the sources of the openly available data are provided.