The European Research Council (ERC) has published an in-depth analysis of all research projects funded by the ERC under Horizon 2020. The study ‘Mapping of ERC Frontier Research‘ was published on 14 July 2022 and includes thirty factsheets showcasing the diversity of the funded research, emerging areas of science, new methods and interdisciplinary links between research problems addressed by ERC grantees, as well as geographic patterns in the distribution of projects across Europe. The mapping also found that a large share of the bottom-up curiosity driven research projects funded by the ERC without thematic priorities tackles key global challenges.
The factsheets bring a number of interesting observations on the distribution of ERC funded projects among EU member states and associated countries. For instance, whilst Germany is particularly strong in life sciences (LS) as well as physical sciences and engineering (PE), the UK and the Netherlands together host 40 % of all projects in social sciences and humanities. Some countries do very well in specific fields e.g., 21% of all projects in mathematics are hosted in France and 31% of the projects hosted in Poland are in computer science and informatics.
The ERC schemes are crucial to help science advance. Those instruments should be able to stay competitive with the participation of countries such as the United Kingdom and Switzerland which are respectively the first and fifth countries in terms of amount of projects under Horizon 2020.
The “Mapping of ERC Frontier Research” can be explored under the ERC website: Mapping ERC Frontier Research | ERC: European Research Council (europa.eu)