In late 2017, the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Research & Innovation contracted Science-Metrix and project partner PPMI for the three-year project Provision and analysis of key indicators in research and innovation.

The project brief was to collect and update bibliometric, patent and other intellectual property (IP) data, as well as to develop and collect new data on business innovation based on Big data approaches. The project was designed to support the development and implementation of the Commission’s R&I policies by providing evidence at the European Union (EU), country and regional levels.

This report presents the detailed suite of methods used in producing the data for the study. More specifically, the report provides a detailed account of the steps taken in producing indicators on the innovation activities of enterprises, on trademarks and designs, on patents and on scientific publications.

The suite of methods covers the following items:

• identifying data sources
• processing data
  • database administration
  • data standardization
    • matching data to different levels of geographical aggregation (e.g., countries and NUTS regions)
    • identifying leading research organizations (e.g., universities, public research organizations and companies)
  • conventions applied (e.g., coverage of document types, counting methods)
• matching data to the various classification schemes used in reporting the data (e.g., NACE sectors and Frascati fields of science and technology)
• defining and computing indicators

Various annexes provide quick access to all data sources as well as the geographical and thematic scope of the study. They also provide details on the approach to the graphical presentation of data and a description of the approach for assigning a gender to individual names.

Read the Final study approach report and methods here.

Read the study’s final report here.

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