CORDIS Project Database: How to Search and Explore EU-Funded Research
What Is CORDIS?
CORDIS — the Community Research and Development Information Service — is the European Commission's official public repository for EU-funded research and innovation projects. Maintained by the Publications Office of the European Union, it serves as the authoritative record of what has been funded across every Framework Programme, from FP1 through to the current Horizon Europe.
For researchers, grant managers, and consortium builders, CORDIS is the starting point for any serious proposal preparation. Before you can argue that your idea is novel, you need to know what has already been funded. Before you can identify partners with the right track record, you need to know who has delivered in your domain before.
As of early 2026, CORDIS contains:
| Programme | Projects |
|---|---|
| Horizon Europe (2021–2027) | 19,495 |
| H2020 (2014–2020) | 35,389 |
| FP7 and earlier | Several thousand additional projects |
Across all programmes, more than 56,000 unique organisations have participated as coordinators or partners. That scale of data makes CORDIS one of the most valuable — and underutilised — resources available to the European research community.
What Data Does CORDIS Contain?
Each project record in CORDIS is structured around a consistent set of fields. Understanding what is available helps you plan targeted searches.
Project-Level Fields
| Field | Description |
|---|---|
| Title | The full project name |
| Acronym | Short identifier used in official communications |
| Objectives | The project's scientific and innovation goals (often 300–800 words) |
| Start / End Date | Contract duration |
| Total Cost | Full project budget including all funding sources |
| EU Contribution | The amount funded by the EU (EC Max Contribution) |
| Call Identifier | The specific call under which the project was funded (e.g. HORIZON-CL4-2022-RESILIENCE-01) |
| Topic Code | The sub-topic within the call |
| Funding Scheme | The instrument type: RIA, IA, CSA, ERC, MSCA, etc. |
| Status | Signed, ongoing, or closed |
| Programme | Horizon Europe, H2020, FP7, etc. |
Organisation-Level Fields
For each project, CORDIS lists every participating organisation with:
- Name and country of the organisation
- Role: coordinator or participant
- Activity type: higher education institution, research organisation, private company, public body, SME, etc.
- EU contribution allocated to that specific organisation
Publications and Deliverables
Projects report their outputs to CORDIS over the project lifetime. These include peer-reviewed publications (linked via OpenAIRE DOIs where available) and formal deliverables submitted to the Commission. Coverage is partial — not every project reports outputs consistently — but for mature H2020 projects the publication data can be substantial.
Open Data Access
CORDIS is a fully open dataset. All project data is freely downloadable as CSV or XML via the EU Open Data Portal. Downloads are available per programme and updated regularly. This makes it possible to build local analyses, power your own tools, or cross-reference with external databases.
How to Search CORDIS
1. Basic Keyword Search
The main search interface is at https://cordis.europa.eu/search. Enter any combination of terms and CORDIS will return matching projects, ranked by relevance.
The search covers project titles, acronyms, and objectives text. Results can be sorted by relevance, start date, or EU contribution.
Practical tip: CORDIS search is case-insensitive. Searching for quantum computing returns the same results as Quantum Computing. However, the search is purely keyword-based — it matches the literal terms you enter, not the concepts behind them. This matters when your topic can be described in multiple ways.
2. Advanced Filters
After running a basic search, the left-hand panel gives you a set of filters to narrow results:
| Filter | Options |
|---|---|
| Programme | Horizon Europe, H2020, FP7, FP6, etc. |
| Funding Scheme | RIA, IA, CSA, ERC Advanced Grant, MSCA-ITN, and others |
| Country | Coordinator's country or any participant country |
| Start / End Year | Filter by project timeline |
| Topic | Specific call topic codes |
| Status | Signed, ongoing, closed |
Combining filters is the most reliable way to get a manageable result set. If you are preparing a proposal for a specific Horizon Europe cluster, filtering by programme and topic code quickly shows you the directly comparable funded work.
3. Reading a Project Detail Page
Each CORDIS project page follows a consistent layout:
- Summary tab: Core metadata — dates, budget, call, topic, funding scheme
- Objective tab: The full project objectives as submitted
- Participants tab: All consortium members with their countries, roles, and individual funding allocations
- Results tab: Publications, deliverables, and final reports (where available)
The objectives text is the most valuable field for proposal preparation. Reading five to ten objectives from closely related funded projects gives you a reliable picture of the vocabulary, framing, and scope that reviewers have already accepted.
4. Organisation Search
CORDIS includes a separate organisation search that lets you find specific institutions and see all the projects they have participated in. This is useful for:
- Verifying a potential partner's track record before approaching them
- Understanding which organisations are most active in a given research area
- Identifying coordinators who frequently lead consortia in your domain
Limitations of CORDIS Search
CORDIS is comprehensive, but its search interface has real constraints that affect proposal preparation:
- Keyword-only matching: If your topic is described as "federated learning" in some projects and "distributed machine learning" in others, a single search term will miss half the relevant work.
- No cross-project analytics: You cannot ask CORDIS which funding schemes are most common for a topic, or what the average budget is for RIA projects in a given area.
- No similarity ranking: Results are ordered by keyword relevance, not by conceptual similarity to your specific proposal.
- No consortium intelligence: You cannot easily identify which combinations of organisations appear together across multiple projects, or which organisations have the strongest track records in a niche area.
For straightforward topic searches, CORDIS works well. For nuanced proposal preparation — especially novelty checking and consortium building — these gaps become significant.
Using CORDIS Data for Proposal Preparation
Novelty Checking
Demonstrating novelty is a core requirement across all Horizon Europe instruments. The Horizon Europe Programme Guide explicitly expects applicants to show awareness of the state of the art and position their work relative to existing funded projects.
A rigorous novelty check means reviewing not just published literature, but funded projects — many of which will not yet have peer-reviewed outputs. CORDIS is the only authoritative source for this.
Practical approach:
- Search CORDIS for your core technical terms
- Apply filters for Horizon Europe and H2020 (the two most recent programmes)
- Read the objectives of the top 10–15 results carefully
- For projects that overlap significantly with your proposal, check their end dates — a recently closed project in your exact area may have produced results that need to be cited and differentiated
Consortium Building
CORDIS organisation data lets you benchmark potential partners before reaching out. Key signals to look for:
- Participation frequency: How many projects has this organisation completed in your topic area?
- Role history: Do they typically coordinate or participate? Coordinators carry the highest administrative burden.
- Country distribution: Horizon Europe consortia are expected to reflect European geographic diversity. CORDIS data lets you identify gaps and target specific countries.
- Activity type mix: A balanced consortium typically includes higher education institutions (for TRL 1–3 work), research organisations (TRL 3–5), and industry partners (TRL 5–8+).
Budget Benchmarking
Total cost and EU contribution figures in CORDIS are reliable reference points for calibrating your own budget. For a given funding scheme and topic area, you can establish the typical range:
- Filter by funding scheme (e.g. RIA) and topic
- Sort by EU contribution to see the distribution
- Use
ecMaxContributionas a proxy wheretotalCostis not reported — approximately 49% of projects report only the EC contribution figure
Note that budget norms shift across programming periods. H2020 budgets are not directly comparable to Horizon Europe due to inflation, scope changes, and updated indirect cost rules.
Topic Trend Analysis
Browsing CORDIS by call topic over time reveals which research directions the Commission has consistently funded and where investment is growing. Cross-referencing this with the current Horizon Europe Work Programmes helps identify calls where the funded project base is thin — a potential opportunity — versus highly contested areas with dozens of prior awards.
Beyond Basic CORDIS Search
For straightforward lookups, the CORDIS interface is sufficient. But proposal preparation increasingly requires a more analytical relationship with the data.
The core limitation is that keyword search treats your query as a bag of words. A proposal about "climate-resilient urban infrastructure" will not reliably surface funded projects about "heat adaptation in cities" or "urban greening for thermal comfort" — even though these describe closely related work. Missed overlap is a proposal risk: reviewers are domain experts and will notice if your novelty claims are undermined by a project you did not cite.
Semantic search addresses this by representing both your proposal and funded projects as dense vector embeddings, then finding matches by conceptual proximity rather than exact term overlap. This approach surfaces projects that are thematically similar even when they use entirely different vocabulary — which is common across language communities in a pan-European programme.
CriteriaI's Project Explorer provides semantic search over 54,884 Horizon Europe and H2020 projects, with filters for funding scheme, country, date range, and topic. You can search in natural language and retrieve ranked results by conceptual similarity, which complements rather than replaces a CORDIS keyword search. For proposal preparation, running both searches and comparing the result sets is the most thorough approach.
Conclusion
CORDIS is an essential resource for anyone preparing EU grant proposals — not optional background reading, but a core part of the preparation process. Understanding what has been funded before is the only reliable way to make credible novelty claims, identify capable partners, and calibrate your budget expectations against real precedents.
The CORDIS interface at cordis.europa.eu handles straightforward lookups well. For deeper analysis — particularly when your topic spans multiple terminologies or you need to understand consortium patterns at scale — supplementing CORDIS with semantic search tools gives a more complete picture of the funded landscape.
The data is public, comprehensive, and updated regularly. The researchers who use it systematically are better positioned than those who do not.
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