SICRIS (the Slovenian Current Research Information System) is Slovenia’s national registry of research organisations, researchers, research groups, programmes, projects, and equipment. It is the country’s implementation of a Current Research Information System (CRIS), and it doubles as the operational database behind Slovenia’s national research-evaluation and funding processes.
What SICRIS covers
SICRIS is organised around five linked databases:
- Researchers — employment records, contact details, and bibliographies for active researchers working on projects funded by Slovenia’s research agency, tracked since 1998.
- Projects and programmes — nationally funded research initiatives, including financial data, timelines, and participating teams.
- Organisations — research-performing institutions in Slovenia, tracked since 1995.
- Research groups — team-level structural information and the projects a group is currently running.
- Equipment — specialised research infrastructure registered against an organisation or group.
Each Slovenian researcher who has held agency funding is assigned a unique researcher code, which is the identifier used across SICRIS records, grant applications, and reporting forms — functionally similar in role (though not in scope or governance) to how a CERIF-modelled CRIS elsewhere might use an internal person identifier alongside an ORCID iD.
Governance: IZUM and ARIS
SICRIS is developed and maintained jointly by the Institute of Information Science (IZUM), based in Maribor, and the Slovenian Research and Innovation Agency (ARIS) — the national funding and research-policy agency formerly known as ARRS (Javna agencija za raziskovalno dejavnost Republike Slovenije), which was renamed and given an expanded innovation remit in 2023. IZUM is the same organisation that built and runs COBISS, Slovenia’s shared library and bibliographic system, which is why SICRIS and COBISS are so tightly integrated in practice. Data entry into SICRIS is largely done through prescribed ARIS forms, with researchers holding an ARIS code able to update parts of their own record directly.
For background on ARIS’s funding programmes and how they relate to its predecessor ARRS, see CASRAI’s ARIS (Slovenian Research and Innovation Agency) funding overview.
How SICRIS connects to COBISS
COBISS (Co-operative Online Bibliographic System and Services) is the shared library and cataloguing infrastructure that underlies public and academic library systems across Slovenia and several other Southeast European and Western Balkan countries — the search snippets for this integration reference Serbia, North Macedonia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Bulgaria, and Albania as COBISS.Net members alongside Slovenia. SICRIS is linked directly to COBISS.SI and to COBIB.SI, the shared national bibliographic database, so that a researcher’s publication list on SICRIS is drawn from — and stays consistent with — their catalogued library record rather than being entered a second time.
This link matters for research administrators for a practical reason: because bibliographic records are catalogued and typed centrally in COBISS using a shared typology of documents, the publication list that appears on a researcher’s SICRIS profile reflects a standardised classification (journal article, conference contribution, monograph, and so on) rather than a self-reported CV entry — which is part of why the data is usable for national-level evaluation and reporting rather than only individual bibliography display.
Beyond Slovenia, the same underlying architecture runs as E-CRIS in other COBISS.Net member countries, giving each participating country its own national CRIS built on comparable infrastructure rather than a single shared cross-border instance.
Role in research evaluation and funding
Because SICRIS is the operational database behind ARIS’s own funding and evaluation processes, it functions as more than a public directory. ARIS applies its own methodology for categorising and evaluating scientific publications — built on the COBISS document typology described above — directly against records held in SICRIS, and that categorisation feeds into processes such as project and programme evaluation, habilitation and promotion dossiers, and reporting on publicly funded research output. In practice, this means a Slovenian researcher’s SICRIS-linked bibliography is not just a discovery tool for outside readers; it is the same record ARIS and evaluation panels draw on internally.
For an international funder, collaborator, or research office assessing a Slovenian partner, SICRIS is generally the fastest way to confirm a researcher’s institutional affiliation, current and past agency-funded projects, and publication record, without needing a separate CV or bibliography from the researcher.
SICRIS2 and the platform’s technical evolution
The SICRIS platform has been re-built more than once since its original launch. A migration from a Windows-based platform to Linux was completed in 2022, releasing “SICRIS2” (version 1.0) — a rebuilt application layer over the same underlying data model and COBISS integration, rather than a change to what SICRIS covers or who governs it.
Using SICRIS as a research administrator
A few practical points for anyone outside Slovenia who needs to work with SICRIS records:
- SICRIS is a live public lookup tool (accessible at sicris.si), not something that requires a Slovenian institutional login to search — organisation, researcher, and project records can be browsed directly.
- Publication lists surfaced on a SICRIS researcher profile are sourced from COBISS/COBIB, so cross-checking a specific publication against the researcher’s COBISS record is the right way to resolve any discrepancy, rather than treating the SICRIS bibliography as independently maintained.
- Because SICRIS predates, and sits alongside, international persistent-identifier infrastructure, do not assume a SICRIS researcher code is interchangeable with an ORCID iD or a CERIF-model person identifier from another country’s CRIS — treat it as Slovenia’s own national identifier, useful for confirming ARIS-funding history specifically.
Frequently asked questions
What does SICRIS stand for?
SICRIS stands for the Slovenian Current Research Information System — the national CRIS for research organisations, researchers, groups, programmes, projects, and equipment in Slovenia.
Who runs SICRIS?
SICRIS is developed and maintained jointly by IZUM (the Institute of Information Science, in Maribor) and ARIS, the Slovenian Research and Innovation Agency — the successor agency to ARRS.
Is SICRIS the same system as COBISS?
No. COBISS is Slovenia’s (and the wider region’s) shared library and bibliographic cataloguing system. SICRIS is the separate national CRIS for research organisations, people, and projects, but it is directly linked to COBISS/COBIB so that publication data is shared between the two rather than duplicated.
Does SICRIS use an international CRIS data standard?
euroCRIS’s CERIF data model and international recommendations were referenced in SICRIS’s development, alongside Slovenia’s own legal and reporting requirements — consistent with the general pattern of national CRIS systems aligning to CERIF concepts without necessarily running CERIF as their literal internal schema.
Can researchers outside Slovenia use SICRIS?
Yes — SICRIS’s researcher, organisation, and project records are publicly browsable, which makes it a practical reference point for international funders, co-applicants, or research offices who need to verify a Slovenian partner’s affiliation and funded-project history.
Related CASRAI resources
- CRIS — the general concept SICRIS is a national implementation of.
- CERIF — the data model referenced in SICRIS’s development.
- euroCRIS — the international body behind CERIF and a directory of CRIS systems worldwide.
- CRIS vs. Institutional Repository vs. RIMS — how a national CRIS like SICRIS differs from a repository.
- ARIS (Slovenian Research and Innovation Agency): Funding Overview — the agency that co-governs SICRIS.
