When Acknowledgements Don’t Match: Evidence from Horizon 2020

Abstract Funding acknowledgements have become a valuable data source in recent years. The validity of acknowledgements as indicators of direct project-level support, however, remains contested for several reasons. This study examines the reliability of funding acknowledgement data by comparing publications that acknowledge the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Framework Programme in Scopus with publications officially recorded as project outputs in the CORDIS database. Focusing on social science–related fields, this study conducts aggregate-, project-, and semantic-level analyses to assess the correspondence between acknowledged and administratively recorded funding. The results show a substantial and persistent mismatch: only about half of the publications acknowledging Horizon 2020 funding in Scopus can be linked to a corresponding project in CORDIS. This divergence is persistent over time, occurs across funding instruments and subject areas, and is unlikely to be explained solely by reporting delays, administrative incompleteness, or technical matching limitations alone. Instead, the semantic analysis indicates that many unmatched publications are thematically more distant from the confirmed research core of funded projects, suggesting that funding acknowledgements in bibliographic metadata capture also broader, indirect, or non-project-core relations to funding beyond formally reported project outputs.