Methodology

ER-Rank is based on the freely and publicly available data on European research projects which have been funded by the European Commission during the past years. This data is taken from the CORDIS database which has been published via the internet by the European Commission at http://cordis.europa.eu/

Ranking Criteria:

Funding & Projects

Total Project Funding

Total funding allocated to projects the institution has participated:

The total project funding does not express the funding a given institution has received but is the sum of the grants allocated to projects this institution has participated in

Total Project Funding per Partner

Total funding allocated to projects the institution has participated divided by the number of partners:

The funding each participant receives is not published by CORDIS, the project data sheets only contain the sum of grants for each project. We therefore had to estimate an approximative amount which we calculated by dividing the project grant by the number of participant.

Total Number of Projects

Total number of projects a institution has participated:

This index is using the count of the total number of projects an institution has participated in

Networking

Networking Rank (Reputation)

Rank, Reputation or Prestige (similar to Pagerank) of an institution within the network of project partners:

Quality of Networking activity: We use a variant of the PageRank algorithm to calculate the rank of a given institution within the European Research Network. The assumption hereby is that the quality or rank of partner institutions within a project determine the rank of a given partner.

Partner Constancy

Constancy or loyalty of partners of this institution:

To estimate the 'loyality' of institutions we use the ratio between co-participants a given instititutions has repeatedly cooperated and those this institution has cooperated only once.

Project Leadership Index

Leadership according to the ratio and number of coordinated projects:

This index is calclated using the ratio between the number of projects a given institution has coordinated vs. the number he has 'only' participated in. The total number of projects is also weighted and used in an additional correction factor to calculate this index in order to avoid overestimation of those institutions which have participated in a low number of projects but coordinated one or two of them.

Diversity

Diversity Index

The diversity of CORDIS categories by which projects of this institution have been tagged:

Diversity of research areas: Each project information sheet contaims keywords which indicate the area of research of a distinct project taken from the CORDIS Subject Index Classification Codes.
We take the coverage as well as frequency of category terms a instition reaches within a given period of time and use a modified Herfindahl Index to calculate the diversity of research interest.