Internationality is a key factor in successful research. Key dimensions include EU research funding, international research collaborations, visiting researchers and international reviews. The Funding Atlas provides selected figures on these aspects.
Researchers have various opportunities to obtain third-party funding for their research projects. Following the two largest funding sources – the federal government and the DFG, which each accounted for about 30 percent of third-party income at German HEIs in 2022 – around one tenth of research funding was provided under the EU framework programme.
As shown in Figure 3-1a, Germany leads the European competition in terms of Horizon Europe funding: in the first two years of the programme – 2021 and 2022 – researchers based in German HEIs, non-university research institutions and industry secured over €4.1 billion. They were followed by France (€2.8 billion), Spain (€2.7 billion), the Netherlands, Italy and Belgium.
A significant shift within this leading group occurred in the wake of Brexit in 2020: the United Kingdom previously ranked second under the previous programme, Horizon 2020. Greece, previously in 12th place, has now entered the top ten. As in Germany, successful EU third-party funding in Greece is distributed fairly evenly among researchers based in HEIs, non-university research institutions and industry.
One major funding pillar of Horizon Europe is the European Research Council (ERC). Counting the number of researchers per country who received Starting, Advanced or Consolidator Grants, Germany likewise ranks first: 515 ERC grantees are based in Germany, or around 22 percent of all funded researchers.
Research thrives on collaboration – across institutions, disciplines and national borders. The DFG monitors a selection of its coordinated programmes to track the extent to which researchers from other countries opt to come to Germany to participate in these DFG-funded collaborations, whether they are early-career or established investigators. The latest monitoring data indicates that nearly 9,500 researchers from 134 countries came to Germany for this purpose.
As illustrated in the figure, researchers previously based in the USA make up the largest group, with around 1,000 contributing to the success of DFG-funded Collaborative Research Centres, Research Training Groups and Clusters of Excellence in 2022. Meanwhile significant numbers also came from the UK, India, China and Italy – the same five countries that topped the list in the 2021 Funding Atlas.
As the colours in the bars show, these collaborations span all four scientific disciplines defined by the DFG.
In 2024 the DFG also published an Infobrief specifically for the group of so-called visiting researchers, drawing on data from 2023. This data clearly shows the impact of China’s strict “zero-COVID” policy, for example: the share of visiting researchers from China dropped sharply from 8.1 percent (2019) to 5.1 percent (2020) and 3.3 percent (2021), and has not since rebounded (2022: 3.5 percent; 2023: 2.2 percent). The share of visiting researchers from Russia also fell significantly in 2021 (from over 8 percent to between 2 and 3 percent).
The international character of DFG-funded research is especially evident in the review process: nearly 30 percent of all reviewers work at research institutions outside Germany.
The USA and the UK are clearly in the lead, followed at some distance by Switzerland and Austria. International peer review was last featured in the Funding Atlas in 2003 (then entitled “Funding Ranking”). At the time, Switzerland and Austria accounted for 63 percent of all international DFG reviews. These two countries’ share has since dropped significantly to 18 percent, indicating a dynamic transformation in the internationalisation of the DFG peer review process over the past two decades.
