Data story highlights disciplinary diversity in the second round of the German federal and state governments’ Excellence Strategy / “Analysis of great relevance to the research system”

The Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) has published data on involvement of the various subject areas in the 70 Clusters of Excellence funded under the federal and state governments' Excellence Strategy. As decided by the Excellence Commission in mid-May, 45 projects currently in receipt of funding will be renewed and 25 new clusters will receive funding in connection with the second competitive round beginning in 2026. Using the format of a data story for the first time (www.dfg.de/datastory/exstra-faechervielfalt), the DFG presents the results of an analysis showing which subject areas are involved in these 70 clusters and how their interplay shapes the interdisciplinary research profile of each cluster. One key insight is that the subject profile of the clusters largely mirrors that of ongoing DFG-funded research. Only minor shifts have occurred compared to the first funding round. In terms of the researchers involved (Principal Investigators, or PIs), the data show a broad disciplinary range, with almost 90 percent of teaching and research fields (TaR) involved being represented at German universities.

“Our extensive statistical analysis of the involvement of subject areas in the Clusters of Excellence is of great relevance to the research system,” said DFG President Professor Dr. Katja Becker. “It demonstrates the broad disciplinary basis on which the 70 selected clusters are built.” “It is also fascinating to explore the network map of subject interconnections,” she added. “This shows the high degree of interdisciplinarity within the clusters and highlights which subject areas have particularly dense connections – with artificial intelligence now established as a key node within the overall network, for instance.”

Clusters of Excellence and General DFG Funding in Comparison

The newly published analysis begins by comparing the subject-specific focus of the Clusters of Excellence with the broader subject distribution found across DFG-funded research as a whole – which is well documented in sources such as the triennial Funding Atlas (https://www.dfg.de/foerderatlas). A comparison of the clusters’ self-designated research areas with those of all ongoing DFG-funded projects in 2024 reveals a remarkably high degree of alignment – particularly in the humanities and social sciences, in biology, and in four out of five engineering research areas. Physics shows an above-average affinity for the Clusters of Excellence funding line (accounting for 17 percent of projects, compared to just 8 percent across general DFG funding). By contrast, medicine is slightly underrepresented in the clusters (19 vs. 25 percent). On the whole, however, the subject profile of the Clusters of Excellence closely reflects that of general DFG funding.
Compared to the first funding phase, there have been very few changes in subject-specific focus, a fact that can largely be attributed to the continuation of funding for 45 out of the 70 clusters in the second phase. Social and behavioural sciences, medicine, materials science and engineering are slightly more prominent in the current round, while chemistry and the field of mechanical and production engineering are somewhat less represented. On the whole, however, the differences in terms of the share of each research area are minimal.

Focus on the Principal Investigators (PIs) Involved

Further analyses focus on the disciplinary backgrounds of the Principal Investigators (PIs) involved in the clusters. It was possible to identify up to 25 PIs per cluster, with data available for 1,740 individuals in total. These PIs were assigned to the corresponding subject areas based on the subject-specific classification of their respective institutions. An initial evaluation compares the subject distribution of the PIs with that of all university professorships in Germany. This was done using the subject classification system of the Federal Statistical Office (Destatis), which distinguishes a total of 69 teaching and research fields; comparative data relating to the number of professors was available for 59 of these. The initial results show that teaching and research fields with a large number of professors overall tend to be well represented among the PIs in the clusters as well. Notable positive outliers include biology and physics/astronomy. In total, 88 percent of all teaching and research areas for which Destatis provides data on professorial staff are represented in the Clusters of Excellence.

The data story also reveals that the clusters demonstrate considerable disciplinary breadth. On average, 6.5 teaching and research fields are involved in each cluster. The distributions across the four major scientific disciplines vary significantly, however. In the natural sciences, cluster participation tends to be moderately broad – most clusters in this domain involve PIs from two to four of the teaching and research fields. The other three domains show considerably broader participation: in the humanities and social sciences and in engineering, there are seven clusters that each integrate ten or more fields of teaching and research.

Small vs. Large Subject Areas and Interdisciplinarity

Is the Excellence Strategy primarily tailored to large subject areas? Does the programme exclude small subject areas, perhaps even unintentionally? These questions were also addressed by the DFG’s statistical team. Large subject areas often already have well-established local structures, which can be advantageous when organising a collaborative cluster involving many researchers. In fact, subject areas (based on the third level of the Destatis subject classification) with only a few institutes are slightly less frequently represented among the 70 Clusters of Excellence in the second round of the competition than those with large numbers of institutes. The differences are minor, however, and the current analysis finds no evidence that small subject areas are excluded in any way.

Network analyses offer particular insight into the interdisciplinary nature of the Excellence Strategy. These visualise the relationships between around 200 subject areas (Destatis) that are represented in Clusters of Excellence by more than one principal investigator. The resulting interdisciplinarity network shows the familiar structure observed in previous analyses, with subject areas grouped by the DFG research fields. Artificial Intelligence holds a central position in this network and is now significantly more prominent than in the first round of the Excellence Strategy. “Central” here means that researchers in this subject area have the widest range of connections to other subject areas based on joint participation in a cluster. But it is also worth noting the central positions of several subject areas in the humanities and social sciences. Subject areas such as “Specialised Sociologies”, “Philosophy” and “International Law” often act as bridging subjects, with researchers frequently co-affiliated with clusters in very different subject areas.

The data story format offers users genuine added value: all graphics and tables can be used interactively, and individual aspects can be explored in greater detail. The underlying data is also available for download and can be used and analysed for individual purposes.