Have the European Union programmes made a difference to biomedical research outputs?

TY - CHAP

T1 - Have the European Union programmes made a difference to biomedical research outputs?

AU - Lewison, Grant

N1 - Funding Information: However, this is not the whole story. There are many other European activities that encourage the internationalisation of research, for example the several exchange programmes such as ERASMUS for students, and the Marie Curie programme for researchers. There is also the COST programme that brings researchers together for conferences and seminars. Closer links between EU MS are also encouraged by the European Regional Development Fund, which has improved the transport infrastructure (roads and railways), and the Commission's campaigns to reduce (since 2006) and abolish (since 2017) the trans-national roaming charges paid by users of mobile telephones. Some of the support also comes from the Cohesion Fund which benefits poorer MS. There has been a parallel effort to create a single market for aviation within Europe, which has increased competition, lowered fares, and removed the anti-competitive practices of national carriers found in, for example, Latin America. Safety has been improved by the Single European Sky (SES) programme. These moves have all made international collaboration in research much easier and cheaper. The Single Market has also required public positions within the EU to be open to citizens of any MS. This has had the effect of improving competition and so driving up standards, including in research. For example, cancer researchers located in the UK in 2014-16 included almost 40% of people with non-British names (Begum et al., 2017b), and half of them were from other European countries. So this is one plausible means whereby the impact of domestic biomedical research may have increased more rapidly in EU MS than in the comparator countries. There are two exceptions to this relative improvement in citation impact by EU MS relative to their comparator countries. Norway appears to have out-performed Sweden, and Russia to have out-performed Poland. In fact, Norway as a participant in the European Economic Area (EEA) Agreement (which also applies to Iceland and Liechtenstein) has for many years enjoyed the same free movement of people as EU MS. It is also particularly welcoming to foreigners, as measured by its 11th place in the Migrant Acceptance Index compiled by the Gallup polling organisation in 2016. It has also had an active strategy for international collaboration, and its wealth has facilitated this. The situation in Russia is rather different, because its scientific output and standing dropped very suddenly in 1990-95 as a result of the collapse of the Soviet Union. Its domestic biomedical research output declined to a nadir in 2000-07, and has been rescued by support from the European INTAS programme which started in 1993, and from George Soros in the USA. It may also have benefited more than Poland from the addition to the WoS of the Emerging Sciences Citation Index (ESCI) in 2015, which had varying effects on different countries. Thus the ESCI papers from Poland in 2015-19 were only 11% of the total in the Science Citation Index – Extended plus the Social Sciences Citation Index, but in Russia they amounted to over 29%, and might have led to more citations, particularly from Russian authors. In summary, the improvements in biomedical research collaboration between the new EU MS and the others, and in the citation impact of their domestic research, can reasonably be attributed to the activities of the European Commission over the last four decades. What we need to do next is to investigate how often research papers that involve two or more EU MS acknowledge financial support from the EU in its many different forms. This would be a major bibliometric study, not least because such support can be acknowledged in literally thousands of different formats. As a preliminary exercise, we examined the acknowledgements on German papers in colorectal cancer research in the eight years, 2009-16. Ones written in collaboration with other EU MS were more likely to be in receipt of EU funding, see Table 4. Funding Information: The funding analysis of the German colorectal cancer research papers was carried out by Mursheda Begum, now of Queen Mary University of London. We are most grateful to Dr Charles Kessler, previously a scientist on the staff of the European Commission, for very helpful comments. Publisher Copyright: © 2021 18th International Conference on Scientometrics and Informetrics, ISSI 2021. All rights reserved. Copyright: Copyright 2021 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.

PY - 2021

Y1 - 2021

N2 - This study was designed to see if the several European Union (EU) research programmes, including the Coöperation in Science and Technology (COST) activities, had made a measurable difference to the Member States (MS) who took part in them. We looked at the internationally collaborative biomedical research outputs of six MS that joined the EU at different times (Greece, Spain, Sweden, Poland, Romania and Croatia), and compared them with those of selected similar non-EU countries (Egypt, Brazil, Norway, Russia, Ukraine, Serbia) to see if there was more work done jointly with other EU MS compared with the Rest of the World. We also checked whether the citation impact of their purely domestic biomedical research had increased more rapidly than that of the six comparator countries. The results were somewhat mixed, probably because EU support only accounted for a small fraction of the total cost of this research, but there were some discernible benefits. Suggestions are made for future investigations that would be more likely to reveal the effects of EU programmes.

AB - This study was designed to see if the several European Union (EU) research programmes, including the Coöperation in Science and Technology (COST) activities, had made a measurable difference to the Member States (MS) who took part in them. We looked at the internationally collaborative biomedical research outputs of six MS that joined the EU at different times (Greece, Spain, Sweden, Poland, Romania and Croatia), and compared them with those of selected similar non-EU countries (Egypt, Brazil, Norway, Russia, Ukraine, Serbia) to see if there was more work done jointly with other EU MS compared with the Rest of the World. We also checked whether the citation impact of their purely domestic biomedical research had increased more rapidly than that of the six comparator countries. The results were somewhat mixed, probably because EU support only accounted for a small fraction of the total cost of this research, but there were some discernible benefits. Suggestions are made for future investigations that would be more likely to reveal the effects of EU programmes.

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85112646011&partnerID=8YFLogxK

M3 - Conference paper

AN - SCOPUS:85112646011

T3 - 18th International Conference on Scientometrics and Informetrics, ISSI 2021

SP - 651

EP - 661

BT - 18th International Conference on Scientometrics and Informetrics, ISSI 2021

A2 - Glanzel, Wolfgang

A2 - Heeffer, Sarah

A2 - Chi, Pei-Shan

A2 - Rousseau, Ronald

PB - International Society for Scientometrics and Informetrics

T2 - 18th International Conference on Scientometrics and Informetrics Conference, ISSI 2021

Y2 - 12 July 2021 through 15 July 2021

ER -