Spanish participation in the social science and humanities research projects within the 7th European Union Framework Programme (2007-2013)

3.1.1. Coordination

Out of 164 projects with Spanish participation, single-applicant schemes excluded, 21 were coordinated by a Spanish organization, representing 12.8 % of the total, a percentage double than in FP6-SSH-Spain, which was only 5.6%, according Sulé et al. (2023Sulé, A., Somoza, M., & Ardanuy, J. (2023). Analysis of Spanish participation in the social science and humanities research projects within the 6th European Union Framework Programme (2002-2006). Revista Española de Documentación Científica. 46(3), e363. DOI: 10.3989/redc.2023.3.1986) who did not include singleapplicant schemes. This increase in the coordination percentage resulted in a climb from eighth place in FP6-SSH-Spain to third place, tied with Italy, in FP7-SSH-Spain, among countries that coordinated the most projects with Spanish participation.

3.1.2. Programmes

By programme type (table III), among the 164 projects with Spanish participation, FP7-SSH projects clearly predominated (65.2%), followed at a considerable distance by FP7-SIS (12.2%), and FP7-SECURITY and FP7-ICT (7.9%).

3.1.3. Duration

The duration of 164 projects with Spanish participation ranged from 17 to 65 months, with a clear predominance of projects lasting 35 months (approximately three years, 39.6%), 47 months (four years 17.7%), 41 months (three and a half years, 8.5%) and 23 months (two years, 7.3%).

Compared to the duration of FP6-SSH-Spain projects, the most significant changes were the increase in projects lasting 37 to 48 months (70.2%) and the decrease in the remaining intervals. In any case, most of the projects had a duration between 2 and 3 years (82.3%, table IV).

3.1.4. Funding

Regarding the funds awarded, a comparative analysis with FP6-SSH-Spain data shows a significant increase in the share of projects with a higher cost, equal to or exceeding 2 million euros (table V). This seems to indicate greater ambition in project design.

However, there was no clear relationship between the funding amounts and the duration of the projects (figure 1), in contrast to the FP6-SSH-Spain projects, which followed a logarithmic growth rate (Sulé et al., 2023Sulé, A., Somoza, M., & Ardanuy, J. (2023). Analysis of Spanish participation in the social science and humanities research projects within the 6th European Union Framework Programme (2002-2006). Revista Española de Documentación Científica. 46(3), e363. DOI: 10.3989/redc.2023.3.1986).

Figure 1 Relationship between project duration and amount of funding. 

3.1.5. Disciplines

The results (table VI) show that 7 disciplines had 10 or more projects, with projects related to Economics (49.4%), Sociology (30.5%) and Political Science (23.8%) predominating. These three categories were also the top three disciplines among FP6-SSH-Spain projects. However, after third place there were some differences between the two programmes, as Public Administration and Management was ranked fourth (11.1%) in FP6-SSH-Spain, while this discipline dropped to seventh place (9.1%) in FP7-SSH-Spain. Law maintains its position, although with a higher percentage (FP6-SSH-Spain: 7.8%; FP7-SSH-Spain: 9.8%), while Criminology and Security Science appeared for the first time in FP7-SSH-Spain as disciplines with a significant number of projects. It should be noted that a project may deal with more than one discipline (1.8, on average).

3.1.6. Participation: countries and institutions

Overall, the average participation per project was 13.3 institutions, 2.1 points lower than in FP6SSH-Spain. Among the disciplines with more than ten projects, Public Administration had the highest average participation, with 16.8 institutions per project (table VII).

An analysis of the countries involved in projects with Spanish participation (including the coordinator country) shows an average of 9.7 countries per project, which is very similar to the average of 10.0 for FP6-SSH-Spain. The maximum number of countries participating in a single project is 37 (Trans-national Co-operation among National Contact Points for Socio-economic Sciences and the Humanities, coordinated by Deutsches Zentrum für Luft-und Raumfahrt eV).

If we consider the level of participation of each country (excluding Spain), at the top of the list we find the same countries that predominated in FP6-SSH-Spain: United Kingdom, Germany, Italy, France, Netherlands, and Belgium (table VII).

An analysis of the number of institutions (coordinator plus participants) shows an average of 13.3 institutions per project (figure 2), slightly lower than the average in FP6, which was 15.4 institutions. This decrease is related to the increase in the number of projects exclusively involving Spanish institutions.

Figure 2 Number of institutions per project. 

The institution that participated in the largest number of projects is the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (21), followed by Spanish National Research Council (Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, CSIC) (19) and Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (17) (table VIII). This means an improvement in the participation of Spanish institutions since, in the analysis of FP6-SSHSpain, only one Spanish institution, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, was among the institutions with the biggest participation, and it was only in sixth place.

There were 90 Spanish institutions that participated in at least one project. Focusing the analysis on their nature, the data shows a very small increase in the percentage of public organizations compared to FP6-SSH-Spain (table IX).

The classification of institutions according to the sector categories established by the Frascati Manual (Frascati Manual, 2002OCDE. (2002). Frascati manual: proposed standard practice for surveys on research and experimental development (2002). OECD Publishing.) shows a result similar to FP6-SSH-Spain, with a predominance of higher education institutions, although their weight decreased considerably in FP7-SSH-Spain (from 55.2% to 38.9%, table X). This decrease is compensated for by the growth of the other three categories.

However, if the number of project participations of each one is considered, the predominance of higher education institutions is much more intense (higher education institutions were involved in 53.9% of the 164 projects with Spanish participation) compared to the others (Public Administration, 22.1%; Company/Business, 12.3%; Non-profit organization, 11.8%).

On the other hand, in the case of higher education, the clear predominance of public institutions (31; 88.6%) over private institutions (4; 11.4%) is more intense than that found in FP6-SSH-Spain. The percentages are very similar in this case if the total number of projects of each institution is considered (88.8% and 11.1% respectively).

The geographical distribution of the 90 Spanish organizations participating in FP7-SSH-Spain projects reflects a change compared to FP6-SSH-Spain. Specifically, the decrease in the number of institutions operating within the Community of Madrid. However, it should be noted that most of the organizations classified as “Nationwide” have their headquarters in Madrid.

The ranking of Spanish institutions with a minimum of five projects (table XII) is topped by the CSIC (21), followed by Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (17), and Universitat de Barcelona (13). However, if we consider the funding per project, the ranking changes substantially, with Universitat Pompeu Fabra, and Universidad del País Vasco/ Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea topping the list.

Finally, regarding collaboration with other institutions (Spanish and international), table XIII shows that the average number of participants per project involving Spanish institutions participating in five projects or more was 8.82 institutions, while the institution whose projects had the highest average number of participants was Fundación Esade, with 18 participant institutions per project.

3.1.7. Recovered scholarly outputs resulting from FP7 SSH projects

Of the publications listed in CORDIS, the 107 projects with Spanish participation produced 1,347 publications. Of these, 207 do not appear in OpenAIRE (15.4%) and 298 in Scopus (22.1%). This corresponds to the use of the first three data collection methods mentioned in the methodology.

We also searched for scholarly outputs that acknowledged funding from any of the 107 FP7Cooperation-SSH projects using strategy 2 in Scopus. All 256 records retrieved in this way were found in OpenAIRE, but only 64 (25.1%) in CORDIS. It should be noted that the discrepancy between CORDIS and the other two sources may be partly due to missing information and inaccuracies in the former. On the other hand, it should be noted that OpenAIRE includes document types that are not covered by Scopus.

According to the publications listed in CORDIS, the 107 FP7-SSH projects with Spanish participation produced 1,347 publications, constituting an average of 12.6 publications per project. This figure is lower than the average of 15.4 publications produced by all the 253 FP7-SSH projects (Ardanuy et al., 2023Ardanuy, J., Arguimbau, L., Borrego, Á., & Sulé, A. (2023). Social Sciences and Humanities research funded under the European Union Seventh Framework Programme (2007-2013): the challenge of retrieving its scholarly outputs [preprint]. 27th International Conference on Science, Technology and Innovation Indicators (STI 2023).), but it is well above the four publications per project calculated by Fresco et al. (2015Fresco, L. et al. (2015). Commitment and coherence: Ex-post evaluation of the 7th EU Framework Programme (2007-2013). Disponible en: https://op.europa.eu/en/publication-detail/-/publication/7e74df87-ebb011e8-b690-01aa75ed71a1/language-en/format-PDF/source-80689114.) based on the scholarly publication data in OpenAIRE.

As previously mentioned, CORDIS data have many limitations for being used in bibliographic research. For instance, sometimes it is not possible to identify all the authors of a document. Therefore, it can only be estimated that less than 20% of the 1,347 publications have a Spanish author. Likewise, approximately 85% of the publications are journal papers, a similar figure to the percentage (83%) of publications resulting from the 253 projects funded under FP7-CooperationSSH programme (Ardanuy et al., 2023Ardanuy, J., Arguimbau, L., Borrego, Á., & Sulé, A. (2023). Social Sciences and Humanities research funded under the European Union Seventh Framework Programme (2007-2013): the challenge of retrieving its scholarly outputs [preprint]. 27th International Conference on Science, Technology and Innovation Indicators (STI 2023).).

The results obtained for outputs that acknowledged funding from any of the 110 FP7-CooperationSSH projects with publications in Scopus (strategy 2) are not comprehensive enough for a detailed bibliometric study on authorship or journals, which is not the primary focus of this study, but rather aims to show only certain trends. Thus, it can be noted that the vast majority of the publications are written in English (96%), although some papers are in Spanish or Basque. Among publication types, there is a clear predominance of journal articles (93%), followed by reviews (4%) and other kinds of documents (3%). Only one document, a book chapter, is not a part of a serial source. These results are limited by the nature of the database, which is Scopus. It has already been shown that the estimate from CORDIS data on journal articles is lower.

The bibliometric impact of the journals was analysed on the basis of their quartile ranking using the SCImago Journal Rank (SJR) for the year in which the paper was published. The data show that approximately three quarters of the articles (77.3%) were published in journals in the first quartile, and 14.5% in journals in the second. These figures confirm the general trend to publish in high impact journals, a situation already observed in the analysis of Spanish participation in FP6 Social Science and Humanities research projects (Sulé et al., 2023Sulé, A., Somoza, M., & Ardanuy, J. (2023). Analysis of Spanish participation in the social science and humanities research projects within the 6th European Union Framework Programme (2002-2006). Revista Española de Documentación Científica. 46(3), e363. DOI: 10.3989/redc.2023.3.1986), but also in general findings of a higher concentration of papers published in top quartiles (Moya-Anegón, 2020Moya-Anegón, F. (2020). Letter. Research evaluation entities cause a shift of publication to Q1 journals. Profesional de la información. 29(4). DOI: 10.3145/epi.2020.jul.31.).

More interesting, however, seems to be the data on the year of publication because even though FP7 was active between 2007 and 2013, scholarly outputs continued to be published long afterwards with relatively high numbers of annual publications until 2020 and then decreasing quickly (figure 3). These results suggest that the impact of research funding in the Social Sciences and Humanities continues over the long term, and also that the projects sometimes take a long time to complete. Moreover, publication in the Social Sciences and Humanities involves much longer delays than in experimental science or technology (Björk and Solomon, 2013Björk, B.C., & Solomon, D. (2013). The publishing delay in scholarly peer-reviewed journals. Journal of Informetrics. 7(4). 914-923. DOI: 10.1016/j.joi.2013.09.001.).

Figure 3 Scholarly outputs by year of publication (shadowing indicates years that FP7 was active). 

In addition, it should be noted that on the basis of the main thematic categorization of journals in Scopus (table XIV), although the predominance of Social Science journals is overwhelming, as would be expected considering the context, the FP7-Cooperation-SSH programme covers many areas of knowledge beyond the Social Sciences and Humanities. Journals can belong to multiple subject categories simultaneously, resulting in a total sum greater than 256.