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Dependency of ERC-funded research on US collaborations

Nature Physics volume 19, pages 1746–1749 (2023)Cite this article

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Annually, the European Research Council (ERC) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) allocate resources to promote research excellence in Europe and the USA. We observe that European Union (EU)-based researchers rely strongly on United States (US) collaborations to secure top EU funding, while the reverse is much less common.

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Fig. 1: Asymmetric landscape of EU- and US-funded research: collaborations and mobility.
Fig. 2: Collaboration patterns of ERC and NSF grant winners.
Fig. 3: Collaboration imbalance across scientific domains.

Data availability

The data from https://openalex.org/ used in this work is openly accessible for download using the API https://api.openalex.org/works. Details of grant winners were downloaded for the ERC from https://erc.europa.eu/project-statistics/project-database and for the NSF from https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/download.jsp.

Code availability

The code used in this study is available at https://github.com/chowdhary-sandeep/NSF_vs_ERC.

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Acknowledgements

F.B. acknowledges support from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research under award number FA8655-22-1-7025. N.D. acknowledges J. Marino for his hospitality at Harvard University in 2018 and the valuable discussion during which the preliminary idea of this study was conceived. This work is supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) under Germany’s Excellence Strategy EXC2181/1-390900948 (the Heidelberg STRUCTURES Excellence Cluster).

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Network and Data Science, Central European University, Vienna, Austria

    Sandeep Chowdhary & Federico Battiston

  2. Institut fur Theoretische Physik, ETH Zürich, Zürich, Switzerland

    Nicolò Defenu

  3. Department of Physics and Chemistry, University of Palermo, Palermo, Italy

    Federico Musciotto

Authors
  1. Sandeep Chowdhary
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  2. Nicolò Defenu
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  3. Federico Musciotto
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  4. Federico Battiston
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Contributions

S.C. led the study and performed the analysis. N.D. conceived the initial idea. F.M. provided methodological insights. F.B. provided methodological insights, organized the research questions and supervised the study. All authors substantially contributed to the interpretation of the analysis. S.C. and F.B. wrote the draft, and all authors revised the manuscript.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Federico Battiston.

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The authors declare that they have no competing interests.

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Nature Physics thanks the anonymous reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Chowdhary, S., Defenu, N., Musciotto, F. et al. Dependency of ERC-funded research on US collaborations. Nat. Phys. 19, 1746–1749 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41567-023-02239-5

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