Austrian Research Landscape

Organisations

All public and private universities [1] as well as Universities of Applied Sciences (Fachhochschulen) [2] in Austria were included. In addition, several umbrella organizations and research databases were screened to identify non-academic research institutes [3–5]. However, because no comprehensive central registry of non-academic research organizations exists in Austria, some institutions may not have been identified or included, representing a potential limitation of the analysis. Throughout the data collection and processing stages, the Research Organization Registry (ROR) [6], a global registry providing persistent identifiers for research and funding organizations, was used as the reference framework for institutional identification and mapping.

Bibliometric data

All bibliometric data were obtained from OpenAlex [7] and the CWTS Leiden Ranking Open Edition [8].

Projects

Project-level data were collected for nationally funded projects from FWF and FFG, and for European-funded projects from the European Framework Programmes (FP7, Horizon 2020, and Horizon Europe). FWF [9] and the European Framework Programmes [10] provide open APIs that offer detailed information on individual projects, including funding and participating organizations. In contrast, FFG does not provide an API, but offers a project database from which project records can be downloaded [11]. However, project-level budget information is not available. To estimate the funding for FFG projects per organisation, we manually collected information on the total budgets and funding ranges of individual funding calls and supplemented these data with estimates derived from previous research on FFG-funded projects [12]. Where no reliable information was available, funding was estimated based on average funding amounts. To improve transparency and facilitate future research, we encourage FFG to provide standardized project-level funding data through an openly accessible API.

References

1. oesterreich.gv.at — Universities
2. oesterreich.gv.at — Fachhochschulen
3. foerderkompass.at — Außeruniversitäre Forschung
4. acr.ac.at
5. projekte.ffg.at/partner
6. ror.org
7. openalex.org
8. leidenranking.com
9. fwf.ac.at — Open API
10. cordis.europa.eu — Data Extractions API
11. projekte.ffg.at
12. Schweiger, G. (2023). Can’t We Do Better? A cost-benefit analysis of proposal writing in a competitive funding environment. PLOS ONE.