Projects

Funding

Summary: We have been funded by the European Union for four multinational EU Framework Projects and have received many other academic research and consultancy contracts. We have also completed research for several groups within the United Nations (UNFAO, UNDP) as well as the European Commission Directorate-General of Research, the BBC World Service Trust, Nesta (UK), the UK National Archive, the Joint Information Systems Committee (Jisc), the Milan Chamber of Commerce, the publisher Emerald, and have been part of successful funding bids to European, UK, Dutch, Canadian and German government funding agencies. We are always willing to develop novel methods for consultancy and to participate in multidisciplinary funding bids.

Current externally funded academic project.
- 2021-25: AI4Labour: Reshaping the Labour Force with Artificial Intelligence. This is an EU-funded RISE 2020 project.
- 2019-2024 Digital Values: The construction of values in digital spheres. We are supporters of this European Research Council (ERC) project.
Current externally funded consultancy projects.
- The Responsible use of Technology-Assisted Research Assessment for the four UK higher education funding bodies (February-July 2022), as part of the Future Research Assessment Programme. THE article.
- MORE4 Fourth study on mobility and career paths of researchers in Europe.
Completed externally funded academic projects:

2018-19: Data availability and feasibility of validation. Jisc-funded. Blog post about outcomes.
2018-19: Open peer review. Jisc-funded. Blog post about outcomes and THE article about the project.
2015-2018 EU funded H2020 project: Optimum. Generating next generation transportation solutions.
Picturing the Social: transforming our understanding of images in social media and Big Data research, 2014-2015 ESRC funded project, Led by Farida Vis, University of Sheffield (now Manchester School of Art).
Food for thought and thought for food: the local-global entanglement of the slow food movement: NWO Complexity Programme grant (The Netherlands, 2011-2014). Led by Stefan Dormans, Bas Hendrikx, and Arnoud Lagendijk of the Nijmegen School of Management.
Academic Careers Understood through Measurement and Norms (ACUMEN - 2011-2014) Large FP7 EU funded project: Investigating sources of evidence for the impact of researchers' careers - a CV addition.
Cascades, Islands or Streams? Time, Topic, and Scholarly Activities in Humanities and Social Science Research (2012-13). Digging Into Data project with Indiana University Bloomington and L'Université du Québec à Montréal, internationally funded with the UK component from JISC.
CyberEmotions 2010-2013 This large FP7 EU project on sentiment analysis in social media involved nine European organisations and with a multi-million Euro budget.
Using bibliometric data in the effective allocation of research funding (RES-000-22-4415) ESRC-funded project - PI Dr Jonathan Levitt (from the University of Loughborough).
Web Indicators for the Research Evaluation Framework - Leverhulme research fellow (2011) - Kayvan Kousha.
‘Carbon compounds’: Lexical creativity in the context of climate change - consultants to the Institute for Science and Society of Nottingham University in this ESRC-funded project.
CREEN - EU FP6 project developed the physics of complexity science, and developed web tools to track, model and predict science debates on the web (2005-8).
EU FP5 funded project WISER - an initiative to develop web indicators for science, technology and innovation research (2003-5).
Medici Fellow, a one year funded postdoctoral position (2004-5).
Supportive roles in a Netherlands government funded research project on Integrated Water Resource Management, and co-applicants on a successful small British Council grant for Anglo-Dutch collaboration (2004-7).

Completed external consultancy projects:
- Cybermetrics analysis for the Real-time evaluation of FAO’s COVID-19 Response and Recovery Programme. Our cybermetric analysis was incorportated into this United Nations Food and Agricultural Organisation evaluation report (2021).
- Mobility Patterns and Career Paths of EU Researchers III (MORE III). European Commission funded project, led by Idea Consult. See the More 3 Final Report on the mobility of academic researchers. See and download over 100 indicators on researchers per country, gender, field of science and career stage for benchmarking, profiling or further research.
- Study on the perception of the EU and its policies in strategic countries: a baseline for the Public Diplomacy action under the Partnership Instrument for the European Commission’s Directorate General for Communication, led by the Public Policy and Management Institute in Lithuania (2015).
- A literature review of metrics for HEFCE with CWTS (2015).
- A cybermetric and bibliometric Analysis of the Community of Practice, Knowledge management and Communication and Advocacy component of the UNDP Gender Equality Strategy with AlterSpark. Report here.
- A cybermetric evaluation of publications for the UN Food and Agriculture Organization with AlterSpark.
- Mobility Patterns and Career Paths of EU Researchers II (MORE II). European Commission funded project. Previous project MORE website.
- An evaluation of Flemish costal fisheries research with Idea Consult, 2014.
- An evaluation for the United Nations University with Idea Consult, UNU-CRIS, 2014.
- RESCAR - an initiative to track EU postdoctoral researchers in social sciences and engineering (2006-7).
- Rindicate - "The use of webometrics for the analysis of knowledge flows within the European Research Area". In relation to (DG-RTD-2005-M-02-01): "Multiple Framework Service Contract for Expert Support with the Production and Analysis of R&D Policy Indicators" together with IDEA CONSULT (coordinator), NIFU STEP, and SPRU. The project is set to be published in the EU research information portal.
- Digitised Resources: A Usage and Impact Study - consultants to the Oxford Internet Institute for this JISC-funded project.
- The 1-year JISC-funded project User Needs and Potential Users of Public Repositories: An Integrated Analysis (2006).
- NetReAct - a 14 month initiative to investigate EU life science research (2005-6).
- Twice-yearly online impact reports for the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (NESTA).
- United National Millennium Development Campaign evaluation: In partnership with the consultancy firm Leitmotiv, we carried out a global evaluation of the United National Millennium Campaign. Leitmotiv was the overall coordinator and we provided methodological guidance, statistical synthesis and primary research on media, communication and online advocacy.
- Small research projects for the journal publishers Emerald and the Milan Chamber of Commerce, Italy (2005, 2006).
- Small evaluation projects for UK NGOs and charities.

Unfunded Projects

An (unfunded) Online Social Marketing initiative is was run with the collaboration of the Global Call to Action against Poverty (GCAP)