Draft workprogramme matchmaking offer

Relevant Horizon Europe funding for all your researchers just a few clicks away!

Published at 2022-05-29 by Paul Tuinenburg

Last year, we published a blog about the question we got from the University Medical Center Utrecht about automatically matching the draft workprogrammes in Horizon Europe with all researchers within their institute (read here). Those results proved to be useful so we will do the same analysis for them with the new draft workprogrammes this year. And we can do the same for your university!

What we learned from the previous matchmaking exercise, not just at the UMCU but in universities all across Europe, is that it reduces the workload a lot! In many institutions, research managers read draft workprogrammes and point relevant ones out to some professors, but matching ALL workprogrammes with ALL researchers is a different order of magnitude. At the same time, we learned that the overall quality of the matching was good. With obviously some room for improvement in specific cases.

This lead for us to switch to a slightly different algorithm to improve the overall quality of the matches. This year, there are again a number of institutions that asked us to perform this matchmaking for them. Since this will be relevant to do for far more institutions we will briefly explain the information we will need in order to start the matchmaking.

*1. We need the draft workprogrammes. There are some openly accessible sources online, but in order to make sure we match with the correct workprogrammes we usually ask you to share the versions you find most relevant.

*2. Definition of the researchers; We will first check, together with you, if the coverage in the OpenAlex dataset is of high enough quality. If not, we can work with internal data from the CRIS system. Most information to have is titles and abstracts of most relevant publications per researcher.

Then what will you receive as a result? Well, in a way that’s up to you. Some examples of how we can share the results:

- Master Excel file with the best calltopic matches per researcher (and/or the other way around, best researchers per calltopic)
- Wordfile per researcher with the top X most relevant calltopic matches
- A variation to one of the abovementioned options, for instance on the level of research group or faculty (if this information was shared with us in the first place).

What’s the value of this exercise? Simply to point researchers towards relevant topics for them way ahead of the deadline, so there is plenty of time to start building a consortium.

Want to learn more about this matchmaking, the costs, timeline and other details? Feel free to reach out to Paul(paul[at]idfuse.nl)!