At www.datenportal.bmbf.de, the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) provides access to very comprehensive statistical data relating to education and research. The portal incorporates data of the "Federal Report on Research and Innovation" (BuFI) and the former publication series "Basic and Structural Data" as well as additional data from other sources. The portal is also the source for the annual BMBF publication Education and Research in Figures, which is prepared and laid out by our research unit. However, printed publications are only a small part of the portal’s resources; in most cases, it provides long time-series, some of which go back as far as the 1960s.
This data is provided for decision-makers and researchers in the fields of politics, administration, science and the economy, but also for interested members of the public. The portal currently enjoys an average of 100 to 150 visitors on a typical working day. A large proportion of the inquiries come from people working in the scientific field. The data are provided as barrier-free HTML tables, PDF tables for printing, in Excel format for spreadsheet calculations and in the open format CSV. All data is furnished with an open license as far as permitted by the sources. In addition, large numbers of graphs can be found in the portal. The data can be searched simply by navigating the topic structure or using a key word search.
The data in the portal are organized into four topic areas:
- General overviews and structural data
- Research and innovation
- Education
- International comparison
The overviews and structural data contain key figures that are intended to provide better appraisals and improved comprehension of data provided in the following topic areas. These topic areas cover figures on population, school and university students, the employed and unemployed, gross domestic product and value creation, and public expenditure on education and research, both for Germany as a whole and categorized by federal state. The research and innovation topic area includes facts on expenditure on science, research and development, on public expenditure on science, on expenditure by the business enterprise sector on R&D and teaching, on R&D personnel, and on innovations and patents. The education section includes educational funding, pre-primary education, schools, vocational education, higher education, continuing education and governmental training assistance (BaföG, AFBG student loans). Finally, the international comparison section provides figures from all the above-mentioned topic areas along with an orientation aid so that Germany can be ranked in the international context.
Since 2010 the research area "Research Infrastructure and Methods" runs the technical side of the portal and ensures that the content is up to date.
