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

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.