PID as a key to history – How they Help Shed Light on Over a Century of Research Funding
We introduce new developments in documenting the historical funding activities of the German Research Foundation (DFG). The starting point is GEPRIS Historisch, a database released in 2020 for the DFG’s centenary that provides access to more than 50,000 research projects from around 13,000 scientists between 1920 and 1945. We discuss how this material can be enriched by linking it with external data sources, focusing on the use of PIDs. The dataset was published in 2025 on Zenodo as a scientific analysis dataset, enabling new forms of historical research.
We outline plans to extend the documentation of DFG funding history by closing the gap between 1945 and the start of the project database GEPRIS in 1999. We also present methodological approaches for large-scale PID assignment that enable the systematic linking of researchers.
