Mapping leadership and communities in EU-funded research through network analysis

Area of Science:

• Network analysis
• Data science
• Innovation studies

Background:

• Horizon 2020 and Horizon Europe are key EU research and innovation programs.
• CORDIS (Community Research and Development Information Service) provides open access data on these projects.
• Understanding collaboration dynamics within these programs is crucial for innovation policy.

Purpose of the Study:

• To introduce a novel methodology for analyzing collaboration and leadership evolution in EU-funded research projects.
• To demonstrate the application of network analysis on CORDIS data.
• To provide insights into the dynamics of research partnerships and organizational influence.

Main Methods:

• Data extraction and enrichment from the CORDIS portal.
• Construction of weighted collaboration networks segmented by year.
• Application of network centrality measures and community detection algorithms.
• Temporal analysis to track the evolution of collaborations and leadership roles.

Main Results:

• Identification of influential organizations and stable collaboration clusters.
• Tracking the temporal evolution of these networks and roles.
• Case study application to "hydrogen energy" projects within Horizon programmes.

Conclusions:

• The methodology effectively identifies key players and collaboration stability in research networks.
• Insights are valuable for policymakers and organizations aiming to foster innovation through partnerships.
• The framework can be extended to analyze collaboration dynamics in other research sectors.