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PES2020-Prosj.etabl.støtte H2020

Improving the understanding of health research needs.

Awarded: NOK 0.40 mill.

Our project will develop new methods to classify health and medical research by research type and funding source. Matched with disease burden data, this will allow national, regional and global studies of research alignment in relation to disease burden. First, by comparing alignments with project-developed indicators for societal needs for research for a given disease, or with existing indicators such as Research-dependent Fraction of Global Burden of Disease, which is an indicator expressing how much of the burden of disease that can be relieved by further biomedical research. Then by analysing alignments based on the funding source of research (public, private, non-profit/charitable, unfunded research, etc.), which would also enable us to perform citation analysis of how funding sources may differently stimulate high impact of the research. Finally, we perform case studies involving stakeholders from three broad areas of disease: cardiovascular disease, infectious diseases and sexually transmitted diseases. The purpose of the case studies is to validate the knowledge gaps as expressed by WoS and GBD data with how the research gaps are identified by the stakeholders. Horizon 2020’s Science with and for Society (SwafS) strongly emphasizes the promotion of co-design with citizens, stakeholder and end-users, thus fostering collaboration in the conduct of research so that it is ‘with society’. Our project will serve this mission both by including stakeholders in the planning of research activities, but also – and perhaps more importantly – by studying their stated research needs, thus validating the results from our alignment studies. The challenge is to find good ways to make the classifications, but project participants have solid experience in doing this for both funding Sources, and we will both try a top-down approach (using HRCS research activity codes) and a bottom-up approach (clustering approach/topic maps) to see what works best.

Funding scheme:

PES2020-Prosj.etabl.støtte H2020