We draw on the latest version of the sysres EUPRO database. This database includes all information publicly available through the CORDIS projects database and is maintained by ARC systems research. The sysres EUPRO database presently comprises data on funded research projects of the EU FPs (complete for FP1–FP5, and about 70% complete for FP6) and all participating organizations. It contains systematic information on project objectives and achievements, project costs, project funding and contract type, as well as information on the participating organizations including the full name, the full address and the type of the organization.
For each FP, we construct a network containing the collaborative projects and all organizational subentities that are participants in those projects. An organization is linked to a project if and only if the organization is a member of the project. Since an edge never exists between two organizations or two projects, the network is bipartite. The network edges are unweighted; in principle, the edges could be assigned weights to reflect the strength of the participation, but the data needed to assign the network weights is not available.
We will also consider, for each FP, the projections of the bipartite networks onto unipartite networks of organizations and projects. The organization projections are constructed by taking the organizations as the vertices, with edges between any organizations that are at distance two in the corresponding bipartite network. Thus, organizations are neighbors in the projection network if they take part in one or more projects together. The project projections are similar, with projects vertices linked when they have one or more participants in common. While the construction of the projection networks intrinsically loses information available in the bipartite networks, they can nonetheless be useful.