Effects of European Union Funding and International Collaboration on Estonian Scientific Impact

A positive influence of international collaboration on the impact of research has been previously extensively described. This paper takes a step further by providing an investigation of the effects of funding sources on Estonian research impact based on Thomson Reuters` citation indexes. We ask whether also European Union (EU) funding in addition to international collaboration help Estonia achieve a higher scientific impact. The present paper uses funding acknowledgement (FA) section included in Web of Science (WoS) for determining sources of funding. For this purpose, articles with Estonia in the address section are selected and retrieved from 2008 to 2015 and are divided into four categories based on their funding sources; national; EU; national and EU simultaneously; and other. Results show that EU funding increases Estonian scientific impact significantly. Although there is some variability between research areas, EU funding combined with international collaboration produces the most cited scientific articles. It suggests that EU funding can help Estonia get a better outcome in international collaboration than otherwise possible. The main limitations of this paper include methodical problems how funding agencies are determined in WoS and the time dependence of citations what makes an evaluation of recent publications robust.