Gateway to Research (GtR)

Gateway to Research (GtR) is UK Research and Innovation’s (UKRI) free, public discovery portal for information about UKRI-funded research and innovation. It publishes structured data on funded projects, the organisations and people involved, linked publications, and reported outcomes — searchable via a web interface at gtr.ukri.org and accessible programmatically via two REST APIs (GtR and GtR-2). It does not require registration, a login, or a fee to use.

What data Gateway to Research contains

GtR covers funded projects with start dates on or after 1 January 2006, spanning all seven UKRI research councils (AHRC, BBSRC, ESRC, EPSRC, MRC, NERC, STFC) plus Innovate UK and other UKRI-managed programmes. Research England is excluded, since most of its funding is allocated through block grants rather than individually assessed projects. Each project record is organised into five sections:

• Overview — title, abstract, start/end dates, status, and funding value
• Organisations — the lead research organisation and any collaborating organisations
• People — named researchers and their role on the project, including ORCID iDs where supplied
• Publications — linked research outputs arising from the project
• Outcomes — narrative and categorical data on impact, further funding, collaborations, IP and licensing, spin-outs, engagement activity, and policy influence

Student-level information (associated with training grants) is available only from 1 February 2015 onward. The dataset is refreshed on a quarterly cycle, scheduled for the second week of January, April, July, and October each year, and is published under an Open Government Licence.

Gateway to Research vs. Researchfish — a genuine point of confusion

GtR and Researchfish are frequently conflated because they cover overlapping ground — the same UKRI-funded projects and the same categories of outcome data — but they sit on opposite sides of the reporting relationship and serve different audiences:

• Researchfish is the grantee-facing system. Principal investigators on UKRI awards are contractually required to submit an annual outcomes update through it, from early in the project until at least five years after it ends. It is where the outcome data originates.
• Gateway to Research is the public-facing system. It does not collect outcomes directly from researchers; it publishes a curated feed of the outcome data collected through Researchfish (a service UKRI contracts to Elsevier), alongside project, funding, and organisation data drawn from UKRI’s own grant records.

In short: Researchfish is the mandatory input mechanism a grant-holder deals with directly; GtR is the open output layer built substantially on top of that input, plus UKRI’s own award data. A researcher who has never heard of GtR may still be required to report through Researchfish, and a policy analyst using GtR is not thereby submitting anything to Researchfish. Note also that GtR reflects funded projects and outcomes, not the REF (Research Excellence Framework) impact case study process — REF submissions are made separately by institutions to Research England, though researchers have used GtR/Researchfish records as a data source when building the case for REF impact narratives.

Typical use cases

• Funding landscape analysis — identifying how much a research funder or programme has invested in a given topic, discipline, or institution over time, without needing a data-sharing agreement with UKRI.
• Finding related or prior-funded projects — searching by keyword, organisation, or investigator to see what related work has already been funded, useful when scoping a new proposal or checking for overlap.
• Transparency and public accountability — giving taxpayers, journalists, and Parliament a way to see what publicly funded research has produced, in line with UKRI’s open-data commitments.
• Bibliometric and research-evaluation studies — researchers building datasets that link grants to publications, collaborations, or downstream outcomes, typically via the API rather than the web interface for anything beyond a handful of records.
• Due diligence and horizon-scanning — funders, research offices, and industry partners checking an organisation’s or investigator’s funding history and track record.

Accessing the data

The GtR website supports free-text and filtered search directly. For programmatic or bulk use, UKRI publishes two REST APIs: the original GtR API (built around the site’s own screens) and GtR-2 (a more independent, versioned data model intended to be more stable across UI changes). Both are documented at gtr.ukri.org/resources/api.html; UKRI notes the APIs are intended for users with technical experience and are currently unsupported, so error handling and change tolerance are worth building in if relying on them for an automated pipeline.

Example

A research office preparing a funding-landscape briefing on, say, marine biodiversity monitoring could query GtR for all NERC-funded projects matching that topic since 2015, retrieve total award value, lead organisations, and any linked publications or spin-out outcomes — entirely from public data, without contacting NERC directly.

Counter-example

A principal investigator logging into a UKRI-funded project to submit their required annual outcomes update is using Researchfish, not Gateway to Research — GtR has no submission or login function for researchers; it is read-only for the public.

Related CASRAI terms

Gateway to Research is one instance of a broader CRIS (current research information system) pattern — a system of record for projects, people, organisations, and outputs. See also Funder ID for how funding bodies like UKRI are themselves identified in research metadata, and R4RI mandate (UKRI 2024) for UKRI’s current narrative-CV requirements for applicants. For the broader identifiers and research-information-systems landscape, see the Persistent Identifiers & Research Information Systems pillar.