This article contributes to the development of methods for analysing research funding systems by exploring the robustness and comparability of emerging approaches to generate funding landscapes useful for policy making. We use a novel data set of manually extracted and coded data on the funding acknowledgements of 7,510 publications representing UK cancer research in the year 2011 and compare these “reference data” with funding data provided by Web of Science (WoS) and MEDLINE/PubMed. Findings show high recall (around 93%) of WoS funding data. By contrast, MEDLINE/PubMed data retrieved less than half of the UK cancer publications acknowledging at least one funder. Conversely, both databases have high precision (+90%): That is, few cases of publications with no acknowledgment to funders are identified as having funding data. Nonetheless, funders acknowledged in UK cancer publications were not correctly listed by MEDLINE/PubMed and WoS in around 75% and 32% of the cases, respectively. Reference data on the UK cancer research funding system are used as a case study to demonstrate the utility of funding data for strategic intelligence applications (e.g., mapping of funding landscape and co‐funding activity, comparison of funders' research portfolios).

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This publication is a Technical report by the Joint Research Centre (JRC), the European Commission's science and knowledge service. It aims to provide evidence-based scientific support to the European policy-making process. The scientific output expressed does not imply a policy position of the European Commission. Neither the European Commission nor any person acting on behalf of the Commission is responsible for the use which might be made of this publication.

Recent empirical studies have investigated the territorial impact of Europe's research policies, in particular the contribution of the European Framework Programmes to the integration of a European Research Area. This paper deepens the analysis on the integration and participation of peripheral regions, by focusing on the differences in intensity and determinants of interregional collaborations across three groups of collaborations. We consider collaborations among more developed regions, between more and less developed regions, and among less developed regions. Building on the recent spatial interaction literature, this paper investigates the effects of physical, institutional, social and technological proximity on the intensity of interregional research collaboration across heterogenous European regions. We find that the impact of disparities in human capital and technological proximity on regional R&D cooperation is relevant and differs across subgroups of collaborations. Moreover, despite the efforts of integrating marginal actors, peripheral regions have lower rates of collaborations.

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