For a couple of years information about research funding has been extracted from full texts of scientific publications by Thomson Reuters and offered as an additional data field in Web of Science. This information allows the assignment of publications to funding programmes. In a new project in the Competence Centre for Bibliometrics methods will be developed to use this information for the assessment of funding effects as well as for the analysis of the visibility of a funding organization. Since it has not been studied so far if the offered data is suitable for bibliometrics, the analysis and evaluation of the reliability and validity needs to be the starting point for the study.
Furthermore this project will analyze which motives, regulations and customs lead to an explicit mentioning of research organizations in publications. Apart from legal conditions the strategic usage of funding acknowledgements seems possible.
The results will finally show to what extent funding acknowledgements express an explicit support by the research organization, represent funding activities and can be set in relation to the amount of funding. A co-operation with the DFG is intended to compare information from bibliographic databases to funding information and hence evaluate the quality of the data.
