The Innovative Health Initiative Joint Undertaking intends to conclude a service framework contract with an economic operator to acquire periodic study reports on various bibliometric outputs of projects funded by IMI/IHI with the aim of monitoring the performance of IMI/IHI publication data along the lifecycle of the programme.

IMI/IHI’s projects usually have a lifetime of three to five years. Depending on the year of inception (start of the first project was in May 2009), the on-going projects are in different stages of maturity. To date, the launched projects have yielded over 8 000 peer reviewed papers.

In order to obtain an understanding of the impact of IMI/IHI’s projects, such publication output can be analysed, for instance, with respect to the following questions:

• How many publications were produced?

• What is the impact of the publications in terms of quantitative indicators, such as, e.g., number of citations, citation impact factor, types and impact factor of journals where publications appear, robustness of generated data and conclusions?

• How collaborative are the publications in terms of co-authorship patterns between researchers from different countries?

• Does the publication reflect the interactive and cross sectorial nature of the project?

• Do the authors represent more than one type of stakeholder (e.g. industry, academia, SME)?

• What is the impact of the publications in terms of qualitative indicators, such as, e.g., innovativeness of the R&D results, or relevance for the development of new therapies?

• To what extent do the publications reflect the benefit of IMI/IHI having facilitated the project?

• What is the list of publications from projects?

In terms of publications, the contractor is expected to look into these questions and provide reports with comprehensive and meaningful data and indicators on IMI/IHI’s impact.