Funding agencies need to be able to identify the outcomes of research in order to assess the impact of funding across different themes and, in the case of the European Research Council (ERC), also among different disciplines and geographical areas. In the life sciences, research articles are the core currency of research assessment, therefore identifying articles that have been supported by a given funding agency, and through a particular grant or funding stream, is vitally important. Currently the only way to identify papers in Europe PMC that have been funded by the ERC are:
(1) through metadata associated with the article, usually because the PI has used the grant-linking tool in Europe PMC or a similar tool, post-publication of the article
(2) through metadata received from OpenAIRE, based on FP7-based funding.
Relying on these methods alone grossly underestimate the number of articles that can be attributed to the ERC.
(3) through free text search of full text, which can be error prone due to noise from the full text content of the article, and this approach also does not scale to look for specific grant IDs.
The objectives of the project can be described as follows:
Strategic objectives of the project:
(1) To support the ERC’s visibility as a funder of excellent research by enabling the showcasing of ERC supported research results. Once funding statements are identified they will be displayed prominently as distinct metadata on Europe PubMed Central abstracts and incorporated into searchable fields and programmatic web services.
(2) To support the visibility of ERC grantees (the fact that they have obtained an ERC grant, which is a label of excellence).
(3) To facilitate the analysis of the impact of ERC funding. Unstructured and hard-to-find funding information in full text articles in Europe PubMed Central will be surfaced and made available for straightforward searching and filtering.
Operational objectives of the project (supporting the achievement of the strategic objectives):
(1) To accurately identify statements in full text articles that attribute ERC funding schemes and grants.
(2) To integrate ERC-based funding statements into the Europe PMC interfaces and search.
