Social sciences and humanities research funded under the European Union Sixth Framework Programme (2002–2006): a long-term assessment of projects, acknowledgements and publications

Abstract

The Framework Programmes for Research and Technological Development are funding programmes created by the European Union to support and foster research. This study aims to describe the features and assess the performance of Social Sciences and Humanities research projects funded under the Sixth Framework Programme that was active between 2002 and 2006. The results show that most funded projects were in the fields of economics and political sciences, in line with the use of the Framework Programme to enhance economic development and the integration process in Europe. Research teams showed a high level of collaboration with an average of 7.8 countries and 10.8 institutions involved in each project. However, the large size and diversity of consortia did not translate into a large number of co-authored scholarly journal articles. The results show that research funds in the Social Sciences and Humanities may have long-term effects, with some outputs acknowledging funding being published more than a decade after the end of the project. Qualitative analysis of the acknowledgements in the articles revealed four types of support: direct funding; utilisation of results from former funded projects as the basis for further research; involvement in conferences and networks resulting from funded projects; and utilisation of datasets or other products resulting from former funded projects. The study also illustrates the difficulties in retrieving the outputs resulting from funded projects since the funding information in Scopus is heterogeneous and not standardised. As a result, the type of assessment conducted in this project is time-consuming and requires a significant amount of manpower to clean and standardise the data. Nevertheless, the procedure could be applied to analyse the performance of subsequent European Framework Programmes in building a European Research Area in the Social Sciences and Humanities.

Ukrainian arts and humanities research in Scopus: a bibliometric analysis

“…In particular, bibliometric analysis can be successfully used by scholars to reveal the typical publication patterns at the levels of journals, individual authors, or research institutions, to explore collaboration patterns (Donthu et al, 2021;Kwiek, 2021;Vílchez-Román et al, 2020;Wijewickrema, 2022), or to study the spread of innovative technologies (Agarwal et al, 2022;Liu et al, 2019;Su et al, 2019). In recent years, scholars specializing in scientometrics from diverse countries have extensively conducted bibliometric analyses on national research output within the domain of A&H, utilizing essential core citation databases (for instance: Ardanuy et al, 2022;Bui Hoai et al, 2021;Golub et al, 2020;Mohsen, 2021;Vlase and Lähdesmäki, 2023). Moreover, the results of such research performed in the context of a particular country (see, e.g., Mryglod et al, 2021) can be used to improve national regulations of scientific activity or to perform cross-country analysis.…”