Spanish participation in the social science and humanities research projects within the 7th European Union Framework Programme (2007-2013)

Abstract

The objectives of this paper are to describe the Social Science and Humanities projects involving Spanish participation within the Seventh EU Framework Programme (FP7) (2007-2013), along with the scholarly output generated by these projects, and to compare the findings with the data from FP6 (2002-2006) in order to track their evolution. First, we determine the most significant characteristics of the projects with Spanish participation (duration, funding, topics, type of institution, etc.). Second, we analyse the scholarly production derived from a sample of projects taken from the Scopus database to analyse some bibliometric features. The results show an increase in the leadership and prominence of Spanish institutions, compared to FP6-SSH. In terms of scholarly outputs, none of the sources used (CORDIS, OpenAIRE and SCOPUS) allows a detailed study of scholarly production, although this output is characterized by articles written predominantly in English, published in first-quartile journals. Moreover, data showed that research funding for SSH may have long-term effects, with some outputs acknowledging funding being published a decade after the end of the project.