Bibliometric assessment of European Research Council Grantees – Comparative evaluation

Since their creation in 2007, European Research Council (ERC) Starting, Consolidator and Advanced grants have increasingly become a measure of prestige for universities. The number of ERC grantees a university gets per year can now appear as a proxy to its research excellence. As universities are putting a lot of effort to best support their applicants for ERC grants, they are looking for ways to (i) pre-select the researchers who have the best chances to have a successful application and (ii) proactively identify potential applicants who were not considering an application.

Both the University of Aarhus and the University of Helsinki have analyzed the bibliometric performance of past ERC grantees to try and identify their “performance profile”. The objective of this study would be to build on those past analyses to (i) update results from past analyses (2014-2015 in this case) to analyze the evolution of grantees’ performance for a given type of grant and panel, (ii) compare grantees’ profiles between panels and (iii) try and identify to most relevant metrics for such an assessment.

This presentation explores those different elements, articulated into these main parts:

ERC grant structure and growing importance of those grants for universities

Comparison of methods and results

Analysis of Helsinki University

Analysis of Aarhus University

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