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Background: Evidence shows that territorial borders continue to have an impact on research collaboration in Europe. Knowledge of national research structural contexts is therefore crucial to the promotion of Europe-wide policies for research funding. Nevertheless, studies assessing and comparing research systems remain scarce. This paper aims to further the knowledge on national research landscapes in Europe, focusing on non-communicable disease (NCD) research in Italy and Germany.Methods: To capture the architecture of country-specific research funding systems, a three-fold strategy was adopted. First, a literature review was conducted to determine a list of key public, voluntary/private non-profit and commercial research funding organisations (RFOs). Second, an electronic survey was administered qualifying RFOs. Finally, survey results were integrated with semi-structured interviews with key opinion leaders in NCD research. Three major dimensions of interest were investigated - funding mechanisms, funding patterns and expectations regarding outputs.Results: The number of RFOs in Italy is four times larger than that in Germany and the Italian research system has more project funding instruments than the German system. Regarding the funding patterns towards NCD areas, in both countries, respiratory disease research resulted as the lowest funded, whereas cancer research was the target of most funding streams. The most reported expected outputs of funded research activity were scholarly publication of articles and reports.Conclusions: This cross-country comparison on the Italian and German research funding structures revealed substantial differences between the two systems. The current system is prone to duplicated research efforts, popular funding for some diseases and intransparency of research results. Future research will require addressing the need for better coordination of research funding efforts, even more so if European research efforts are to play a greater role. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The abstract presents results of the "InterQuality Project - International Research Project on Financing Quality in Healthcare" funded by the 7th Framework Programme (FP7) for Research and Technological Development of the European Union. Grant Agreement No: HEALTH-F3-2010-261369 Objective: To assess reliability, validity and completeness of data on pharmaceutical benefit financing components of health care in United States, United Kingdom, Denmark, Germany, Italy and Poland Theory: Information and guidance used by authorities for decision making in the financing of pharmaceutical care should be reliable, valid and complete. Methods: A systematic review of literature published in the last 10 years, found electronically in Medline, Embase, the Cochrane Library and SCOPUS, supplemented by a manual search, was conducted. Quality of publications was critically appraised using PRISMA [1], MOOSE [2] and STROBE [3] checklists. Contents of found literature were assessed in terms of consistency, coherence and strength. Results: In total, 439 full text publications were included, of which 198 papers were assessed for quality. Of these, 24,6%, 31,2% and 22,1% publications presented high levels of: consistency, coherence and strength, respectively, and 4,3% presented concurrently high levels of all assessed areas. Several areas of weak data availability were identified. Discussion: No comparable analyses were found. Credible data were often unavailable. A questionnaire and a template helpful to collect data where more information is needed were developed, validated and will be sent to experts from InterQuality Consortium countries. Conclusion: To improve the quality of information available to decision makers, so that it is more credible, multiple sources should be used. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]