In August, I blogged about some preliminary stats on the finalists for the European Research Council (ERC) starting grants. This week, the ERC released even more preliminary statistics on the finalists. Gretchen Vogel highlights some of the numbers in this week's Science (subscription required).
Some numbers you might find interesting:
Counting all applicants, Italian researchers submitted the most proposals--more than 1500--with the U.K., Germany, France, and Spain rounding out the top five. The U.K. had the highest number of proposals in the finalist pool, followed by Germany, France, the Netherlands, and then Italy.
Sixty of the 559 finalists intend to move to another country to carry out their research, and 23 of those 60 are coming from outside the European Union.
The principal investigators had received their Ph.D.s an average of 5.9 years before April 25, 2007, the proposal deadline for the starting grants. The PIs on the 559 finalist proposals were slightly older: 6.4 years post-Ph.D. (The starting grants are open to young researchers 2 to 9 years post-Ph.D.)
According to the ERC stats, 368 of the 9167 submitted proposals were "ineligible." Although the ERC's document doesn't specify why all of those proposals were ineligible, it does note that 43 applications were thrown out because they didn't include the required support letter.
There's also stats on number of proposals per million inhabitants, per thousand researchers, per gross domestic expenditure, and per million Bunsen burners. (OK, I made that last one up.) Click here for a PDF document with the numbers and graphs from ERC.
