Research fields such as the field of European educational research encompass many different constituting factors. Those factors include its personnel (i.e. authors), research associations (i.e. EERA, EARLI, WERA and the multitude of national/regional associations), institutions, conferences (such as ECER) and many more. The increasing projectification of research and the funding programme logics that accompany it further increase the complexity of the field. 
Even when considering these aspects, the main fault lines of the field remain unaddressed: its underlying theoretical and methodological paradigms (Alise & Teddlie, 2010; Mackenzie & Knipe, 2006). These paradigms are closely intertwined with national, regional and language-specific traditions—such as national schools of thought, policies, curricula and education systems — which further increase the diversity and complexity of (European) educational research. This makes it extremely difficult to identify, analyse and ultimately map the field as a whole. 
 By gathering, analysing, aggregating and mapping the themes of (European) educational research output, first steps to map the field may be taken. While prior work has partly achieved this for conference proceedings (Christ et al., 2025a, 2025b) and efforts for publications are ongoing, the influence of funding programmes on the field’s constitution has yet to be explored.
 This is exactly where the presented project comes in, as we set out to gather information on and map third-party funded educational research projects in comparison to thematic clusters, trends identified within a corpus of contributions to international conferences on educational research (for example ECER, WERA). Those comparisons were enabled by utilizing the results of the webapp EduTopics (Christ et al., 2025b), which contains aggregated information on the themes, authors and countries of affiliation for ECER since 1998.
To even enable a semblance of comparability without potential biases based on skewed data distributions due to national research traditions, policies, languages etc. or selection biases due to focusing on national funding programmes, we selected only third-party funded projects within the “Framework Programmes for Research and Technological Development (FP)” (since 2014: Horizon) of the European Union for the analysis. The themes of the projects were identified by utilizing the mapping functions in the toolbox-section of EduTopics. Based on the resulting distributions, we answer the following research questions:
1.    What are the main themes investigated in FP/Horizon projects?
2.    Do the foci and time trends of FP/Horizon projects differ in comparison to conference proceedings?
3.    How are the FP/Horizon distributed across participating countries? Are the emerging patterns similar or different to the conference data included in EduTopics?
4.    Can we identify contributions to the conferences stemming from FP/Horizon projects?

As a basis for the analyses, we downloaded all relevant information of the “Framework Programmes for Research and Technological Development” FP 5 to 9 (FP8: Horizon 2020, FP9: Horizon Europe) via data.europa.eu. FP1 to FP4 were not downloaded, as they started and finished before the first data included in EduTopics. All data on all projects was transferred into a single database with the variables “Project ID”, “Project Description” (i.e. abstract), “Country” (multiple entries for most projects) and “Category”. We aimed to identify the authors of the FP/Horizon projects by scraping publications linked to each project as well as the file listing the contributors of each FP/Horizon proposal. In the “Category”-variable, the research area of each project is saved hierarchically, for example for an educational FP project on didactics, the variable value is “social sciences >> educational sciences >> didactics”. This resulted in a total of n = 86,256 database entries with n = 21,194 designated as “social sciences” (ca. 24.6%). Of all projects on social sciences, only 2.7% (n = 564) were categorised as “educational sciences”. Subsequently, for those n = 564 projects, the descriptions, authors and countries were extracted and cleaned for further analyses. Three major analyses were conducted: 1) The distribution of FP/Horizon projects across countries was determined including analyses of cross-country collaborations at FP/Horizon. 2) The authors of FP/Horizon projects were matched to the authors contributing to the various conferences included in EduTopics. 3) The thematic clusters and trends of FP/Horizon projects were identified by using the corpus mapping function of EduTopics which applies the topic models of EduTopics to previously unmapped texts. This enabled comparisons between the thematic distributions of the conference data in EduTopics to the thematic distribution of FP/Horizon projects. Additionally, for the main resulting topics of FP/Horizon, trend analyses were conducted to identify whether the thematic trends of the conferences mirror the trends of FP/Horizon projects or whether differences can be identified. We also attempted to identify contributions potentially related to FP/Horizon projects by matching authors across datasets and then determining which conference contributions were thematically closest to the corresponding project descriptions.

As EduTopics will be updated soon in 2026 and the project is currently a work-in-progress, exact distributions or figures cannot be reported yet. First results indicate though, that the focus of topics between FP/Horizon and the conference data differs substantially, with Horizon 2020 projects ranking high in topics such as digital technology, sustainability, and social justice and inequality. In comparison, for ECER in general, digital technology only achieves rank 26, sustainability rank 43, and social justice and inequality rank 37. In total, this project enables a first comparison between European research funding and European conferences on educational research. The findings improve our understanding of the ways in which funding patterns and overarching research trends may be connected, be it through a shared Zeitgeist, through increases in funding as research interest grows, or, conversely, through shifts in research interest following changes in funding levels.

Alise, M. A., & Teddlie, C. (2010). A continuation of the paradigm wars? Prevalence rates of methodological approaches across the social/behavioral sciences. Journal of mixed methods research, 4(2), 103-126. Christ, A., Röschlein, J., & Schindler, C. (2025a). EduTopics: ECER: A webapp for interactive visualisation and exploration of ECER contributions since 1998. European Educational Research Journal, https://doi.org/10.1177/14749041251405570. Christ, A., Röschlein, J., & Schindler, C. (2025b). EduTopics: ECER 2025. https://dipf-lis.shinyapps.io/EduTopicsECER Mackenzie, N., & Knipe, S. (2006). Research dilemmas: Paradigms, methods and methodology. Issues in educational research, 16(2), 193-205.