Calltopics Horizon Europe added to Impacter

After a long wait, the call topics in Horizon Europe were published by the end of June! That’s actually where our work started to get all these call topics into Impacter. In the analyses that we perform in Impacter, some are call topic specific. Which is why we need to have access to the call topic information. The first application of this information can already be seen in the first step in Impacter after your login. As a user you have to type the name of the call topic you are going to apply for (see image below).

After selecting the call topic, the system knows which chapters to expect and after submitting your proposal, what outcomes are expected in the specific call topic. In the topic description of every call topic we can read both a description of the topic and the intention but also the expected outcome of that call topic.

Both the description and the expected outcome are things that Impacter uses in their analyses. We use the description of the call as a comparison text with the first chapter of your proposal to determine to what extend the texts are similar. Not because we want to see an exact copy, but because there should be overlap to make the start of your proposal recognizable for the reviewer. The expected outcome is usually a list of several outcomes that Impacter checks for. We check for the expected outcomes quite literally, as can be seen in the image on the left. It is important to make a clear link in your proposal to these expected outcomes because it is the most direct way for reviewers to evaluate your alignment with the intentions of the calltopic!

Adding the call topics to Impacter isn’t the only change in our analyses. Earlier we published blogs about the changes we made in analyzing proposals. Hereby a short overview:

• Measuring promises; Before, when measuring promises in the proposal we only categorized them in dissemination and exploitation. Much more in line with impact policies we added communication as the third category.
• Sustainable Development Goals; Because so many policies and call topics are influenced by the Sustainable Development Goals, we trained an AI to estimate to which of the SDG’s your proposal links best. More explanation can be found here and here
• Readability; As already introduced in March, we radically changed our readability measure. Before we used the ‘simple’ FKRE-score to measure readability. Although this does say something about the complexity of the text, it is not the best proxy for a good proposal text. Earlier this year we analyzed both successful and unsuccessful proposal with more sophisticated readability measures and we found some significant differences that we now use in Impacter. Read more about our renewed readability measure here

With all these changes in Impacter in the last couple of months we are now confident we are ready for Horizon Europe! Are you?

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