Social Sciences and Humanities research funded under the European Union Seventh Framework Programme (2007-2013): the challenge of retrieving its scholarly outputs

This study follows suit of a former analysis of the performance of Social Sciences and Humanities in the European Union’s 6th Framework Programme by analysing its presence in the 7th Framework Programme that was active between 2007 and 2013. The results show that economics and political science continued to be the disciplines with the largest share of funded projects. As in the former study, the high level of collaboration in project consortia did not extend to the scholarly outputs resulting from those projects, which showed low levels of institutional co-authorship. Most scholarly outputs resulting from projects were articles published in journals covered by Scopus. The study illustrates the difficulties in comprehensibly retrieving these outputs. Some of the scholarly outputs self-reported by the beneficiaries in CORDIS were not covered by OpenAIRE and/or Scopus. In addition, a comparison of the list of self-reported scholarly outputs in CORDIS with those retrieved from Scopus when searching by funding showed little overlap. Some of the outputs in CORDIS were not retrieved from Scopus whereas a large share of the articles indexed in Scopus acknowledging FP7 support had not been self-reported by the beneficiaries in CORDIS. Our results suggest that neither source (CORDIS, OpenAIRE or Scopus) is comprehensive enough as to guarantee a thorough retrieval of the scholarly outputs resulting from Social Sciences and Humanities research projects.