Projects Data
Details of the projects undertaken under the European Framework Programmes were provided by the European Commission for FP6 and FP7 (the Sixth and Seventh Framework Programmes respectively).
The details were taken from the eCorda database. The total number of FP projects in eCorda database is 35,365 of which 25,238 are FP7 projects and 10,027 FP6 projects. These projects involved 210,177 participations by researchers of which 76,562 are in FP6 and 133,615 in FP7. Abstracts for the FP6 projects were provided separately as these were not in the original database received.
In the eCorda database, the EC contribution per project shows some small differences between the data presented by project (project database) and the data presented by participant (participant database). While the difference in EC contribution between the project and participant data is almost zero in FP7 and small in FP6, the differences can become significant when the data is aggregated.
In order to identify the baseline set of nanotechnology-related projects for the NanoData work, a search was made for all FP projects that contained ‘nano’ in the title or abstract of the project. The project details for the selected projects were reviewed manually, where possible, as a further check of the quality of the outputs of the keyword search process.
The 3,544 projects identified as being relevant to nanotechnology were subjected to a further search to identify projects relevant to each sector (health, energy, ICT, etc.). That search was based on the use of sectoral keywords identified by the NanoData project. Where projects were classified as belonging to more than one sub-sector, a proportion of each such project was allocated to the sub-sector concerned. Thus a project relevant to cardiovascular disease and cancer would be allocated 50% to cardiovascular disease and 50% to cancer. The aim was to ensure an accurate analysis of the FP project data and to minimise double counting.
