Looking Through the Lens of Social Sciences: The European Union in the EU- Funded Projects Reporting

In the last decades, European integration and scientific production have come to be deeply intertwined as a result of the Europeanization of many research activities. On one side, European institutions promote the realization of research projects aiming at developing a type of knowledge “close” to the end users’ interests; on the other side, the resulting knowledge contributes to conditioning the practices that take place in the European and national institutions, according to a circular process that brings the innovations to feed back into the system that expresses them. The purpose of this paper is to explore this relationship by examining two peculiar scientific products realized by researchers operating within the broad domain of the Socio-economic Sciences and Humanities (SSH), as a part of the research projects financed by the Seventh Framework Programme (2007-2013) of the European Union: final reports and policy briefs. In other words, it aims to analyse all reports as a whole using some automatic text analysis tools, while incorporating some supplementary variables which help to define the broader context of scientific production.