Introduction 

Who and how many are the protagonists of Italian research in Europe? Scienceonthenet aims at defining the geography of Italian research by analysing the data of the 7^th Framework Programme of the European Commission, available up-to-date. The database Italian Research Map (IRM) collects the data relative to FP7 projects to which more than 2,000 Italian contractors participated, up to Devember 2013. Possible limits and incompletenesses should be referred to the official source. 

Limits and prospects of the study

The results we are presentig are still preliminary, based on the data provided by the European Commission . In this first release, we considered universities and research centres only, without looking in detail at departments and institutes.Besides, we did not considered for the moment the economic size of the projects, nor we normalised the amount of projects for every centre or university by the number of researchers or other parameters.These will be the next steps of the Italian Research Map project, that will be implemented by the portal Scienceonthenet by the end of this year, in order to provide a complete and accurate snapshot of the protagonists of  Italian research and their connections in Europe. The dataset has been published at http://irm.scienceonthenet.eu

European countries by comparison

The 173 Countries admitted to FP7 research programme hold more than 100,000 project partecipations altogether. Contractors at the first 20 places in the ranking boast more then 1,000 participations each and they are all UE Members except Israel, the only non-European Country in the top20, with 1,786 participations to FP7 projects. In this picture, the first relevant data for Italy is its position in respect to other bigs of European research. With 10,619 participations, about 10% of the total, Italy gains the 4th place after Germany, United Kingdom and France and before Spain. These five countries cover altogher almost 50% of the total amount of projects. Italy is then well positioned, even though among the lower places in the top ranking, and quite close to France.

Nations’ weight by themes

Fourth in participation, Italy is however better positioned in regards to some of the 24 significant themes, such as ICT, Space and Environment, where it gains the third place behind Germany and United Kingdom, and Regions and JTI , where it is even first and second, respectively.

Italian comparison

On about 2,300 Italian contractors admitted to FP7, the top ranking goes, as expected, to the most important universities and research centres, like CNR (National Research Council, at the first place), FIAT Research Centre, ENEA, Agency for the Promotion of Research in Europe (APRE), D'Appolonia, Italian Istitute for Technology Foundation, STMicroelectronics and National Institute for Nuclear Physics. Not far behind, also the National Institute for Astrophysics.

The first five positions in the ranking of Italian contractors cover the 10% of projects. CNR, in particular, participates to a large part of FP7 Italian projects. 

It is also very interesting to examine the contractors with at least 10 projects, positioned in the middle of the ranking, and discover that small and big research centres are more numerous than universities, whilst below 10 projects it is interesting to observe the quantity of small-medium companies that managed to grab European projects: these data draw a significant map of Italian innovation and knowledge that, if adequately supported by the public administration, might aim at achieving even better results for Horizon 2020 (see list in the Appendix).

Ordering the European organisations by participations, CNR ranks at the fourth place among those with more than 200 participations each.

Who participates? Which projects?

It is also interesting to estimate the most covered themes (see Appendix) by Italian contractors, such as ICT, People, Health, Transport, Environment (except Euratom-Fission, on nuclear fission, where our centres are tail-end).

ICT
For the ICT theme, CNR, Politecnico of Milan and Turin, other universities, STMicroelectronics, Telecom and FIAT Research Centre establish themselves very well. Besides, some non-academic contractors stand out too, such as Bruno Kessler Foundation, Txt, HP srl, Alcatel. 

Health
In regards to the theme Health, research projects are mostly distributed in the cities of Northen Italy, with several universities, CNR and those institutes involved in medical research by nature and vocation: Italian National Heath Institute (Istituto superiore di sanità), San Raffaele, Mario Negri Institute for Pharmacological Research, Telethon Foundation. Bruno Kessler Foundation and Italian Institute for Technology are once again well positioned.

Environment
The picture slightly changes for the environmental sector of FP7 projects: besides CNR in first position, non-academic centres now gain the top positions for participations – linked to environmental and energetic themes – such as the Euro-Mediterranean Centre on Climate Changes, ENEA, Amra to which follow La Sapienza, Alma mater Bologna, Padova, Tuscia e Firenze as the best positioned universities.
In this case, besides the small and medium industry research, in the second part of the ranking we can find ARPA Agencies, council and provincial institutions, absent in other themes.

IDEAS-ERC
Italian participation is very low in the important programme IDEAS-ERC dedicaded to basic research.

Italian regions and cities

Let us now consider the regions to which contractors belong. For all themes, the regions with the highest presence in the top five positions are Lazio, Lombardy, Liguria, Piedmont, Veneto and Emilia-Romagna. Lazio displays the highest number of top positions (more than 10 on 24 themes) also because CNR and other research centres have their legal residence in Rome, despite having numerous other institutes in other Italian Regions, which were not considered by the EU statistics. Puglia, Campania, Sicily, Trentino-Alto Adige and Umbria follow and sometimes appear within the top regions (for example Campania for Transport and JTI; Puglia for Space and Environment). Despite the firm prevalence of Northen Regions, the presence of some virtuos regional cases is particularly clear for the themes Environment, Energy, Infrastructure, People, Region. It is therefore possible to hypothise that territitory characteristics might favour specific vocations in universities and research centres. For the theme Health, Lombardy overtakes Lazio, despite the bias previously discussed for this region.

Another interesting data concern concentrations by city: Rome and Milan have the highest participation rate.

The European Commission data allow to highlight the peculiarity of Milan that, despite having 1,000 less participations than Rome (due to the already mentioned presence of the legal residence of research centres), is among the ten European cities with the most projects, after Paris, London, almost equal to Berlin and just before Zurich – and without including the contribute of Milan branch of CNR and other national centres (for further discussions on Milan data please consult the first part of the IRM database).

ICT, Health, People, NMP, Transport are the first themes for Milan, exacly as for Berlin (with the same participation distribution) and Zurich, where on the other side the presence of IDEAS-ERC is stronger than Transport.
But also Munich has a particular connection with Italian research: on the whole German territory (Germany is the country where Italy has the highest number of partnerships, abour 8,000) the Fraunhofer Institute in Munich holds more than 500 participations with Italy, and the Max Plank Institute about 200.

IRM project's next steps

The projet Italian Research Map by Scienceonthenet aims at drawing a map of Italian research in Europe. The next steps will analyse single institutes and departments in detail, describe temporal trends, normalise the data by parameters that allow the correct performance-evaluation of the contractors, report in maps and data visualisation the European collaboration network for straightforward interpretations.

IRM’s ultimate goal is, from one side, to become the thermometer of Italian research internationalisation, allowing reinforcement strategies to be based upon solid knowledge of present situations and, from the other side, to offer valid guidance to Italian and foreigner contractors when choosing the right parner.

The portal scienceonthenet.eu, by Gruppo 2003 and Zadig, in collaboration with CNR and with the support of MIUR, aims at disseminating the results of Italian research at European level. Data analysis and visualisation of Italian research’s quality and quantity are among the principal characteristics of the project.

FP7 themes

• ENERGYCOH (Support to the coherent development of research policies)
• COORDINATION (Coordination of Research Activities)
• Environment
• EURATOM-FISSION
• EURATOM-FUSION
• HEALTHICT (Information and Communication Technologies)
• IDEAS-ERC (European Research Council)INCO (International cooperation)
• INFRASTRUCTURES
• KBBE (European Knowledge Based Bio-Economy)
• PEOPLE
• REGIONS
• SECURITY
• SIS (Science in Society)
• SME (Research for the benefit of SMEs)
• SSH (Socio-economic Sciences and Humanities)
• TRANSPORT

Analysis are based on CORDIS data, updated at December 2013. CORDIS dataset contains some imprecisions, which have been reduced with a further elaboration, although their absence cannot be excluded. Data correction is still ongoing, to inform about mistakes write to: [email protected]

irm.scienceonthenet.eu database is based on CORDIS data, updated at September 2013. A further update is planned during the course of 2014.

Data analysis
Francesco Aiello, Michele Bellone, Luca Carra, Sergio Cima, Marco Milano

Data visualisation

Emanuele Conti, Carlo Toccaceli Blasi

Developer www.irm.scienceonthenet.eu

Paolo Griselli

We thank the European Commission and the CORDIS database.