Technical note on the robustness of a modified research excellence index : a feasibility study for the European Research Area Committee

This technical note summarizes the feasibility study which was performed in response to a request by the European Research Area Committee (ERAC)'s Working Group on Monitoring the ERA Roadmap (henceforth WG in short). The ERAC aimed to use a modified version of the Research Excellence composite Index to measure country progress with respect to ERA priority 1,"Effective national research systems". The ERAC WG and DG RTD requested to test whether a robust composite indicator can be constructed by replacing the indicator measuring country performance in terms of world class universities and research institutes with one measuring Marie Skłodowska-Curie (MSC) grants by countries. The main advantage of adding such and indicator was to increase variance for the set of countries, and to capture capacity building and attractiveness, two desirable features of effective national research systems. From the various potential specifications of the MSC indicator, the version which is defined as "All MSC fellows by country of host organization divided by the total number of national (by country of residence) MSC fellows" was found to fit best conceptually and statistically in the framework.