“NSF award search” and “NSF grant database” both usually mean one tool: NSF Award Search, the U.S. National Science Foundation’s public database of funded projects, at www.nsf.gov/awardsearch. It answers a different question than the funding-opportunity search most research administrators reach for first — where NSF’s program solicitations and Dear Colleague Letters (covered in CASRAI’s NSF Funding Search guide) tell you what NSF is currently willing to fund, Award Search tells you what NSF has already funded, to whom, for how much, and under which program. This guide covers what NSF Award Search actually does, how it differs from forward-looking funding-opportunity search, what a search returns, and how to get the same data programmatically or in bulk.
What NSF Award Search is
NSF Award Search is a free, public web application, maintained by the National Science Foundation, that indexes every project NSF has funded since 1989. Enter search criteria — a keyword, an investigator’s name, an institution — and the tool returns a list of matching awards, each linking to a full award abstract page with the award amount, principal investigator, awardee organization, NSF directorate and division, and program officer of record.
NSF describes two ways to query it: Simple Search, a single search box that matches against award title, abstract, names, institutions, programs, and other associated text; and Advanced Search, which lets you filter directly on structured fields — recipient information such as principal investigator name, organization, and location, and program information such as program name, program officers, and which NSF directorate or division funded the award. Results can be sorted by fields including award number, title, start date, location, and PI name, and filtered further by state, country, NSF organization, and award amount or type.
NSF Award Search vs NSF Funding Search: two different directions
These two NSF tools are the most common source of confusion for anyone new to searching NSF’s grant system, because both are official NSF resources, but they point in opposite directions in time:
- NSF Funding Search (program solicitations, Dear Colleague Letters, and Grants.gov cross-postings — see CASRAI’s NSF Funding Search guide) is forward-looking: it lists open and upcoming funding opportunities for applicants who haven’t yet been funded.
- NSF Award Search is backward- and present-looking: it lists projects that have already received an award, whether the award closed years ago or is still active. It answers “who has NSF funded to study X” or “what has this investigator or institution received,” not “what can I apply for.”
A research administrator moves between the two at different points in the grant lifecycle: NSF Funding Search and Grants.gov during proposal development, Award Search during landscape analysis, competitive-intelligence work, verifying an investigator’s current and pending support, or checking a specific award’s status after it has been made.
What you can search for
Advanced Search on Award Search supports filtering by, among other fields:
- Principal investigator or co-PI name
- Awardee organization (institution) name, including by state or country
- Award number, in full or partial
- Free-text keyword search across award titles, abstracts, and associated terms
- NSF directorate or division, and program name or program officer
- Award amount ranges and award dates
Combining fields narrows the results — for example, every award a given directorate has made in a specific program area in a given year, or every award a named investigator has held across their career, active or expired.
What an award record shows
An Award Search abstract page includes the project abstract as submitted by the awardee, the total intended award amount and estimated total amount, the principal investigator(s) and co-PI(s) of record, the awardee organization and performance location, the NSF directorate/division and program that funded it, the assigned program officer, and the award’s start and expiration dates. Older awards funded before searchable full-text abstracts became standard may show more limited detail than a recent one.
Programmatic access: the NSF Award Search Web API
For anyone pulling more than a handful of records, NSF publishes a REST API, documented at resources.research.gov and reachable at api.nsf.gov/services/v1/awards.{format}, hosted as part of the Research.gov infrastructure that also handles NSF proposal submission. It returns the same underlying award data as the web interface, in XML, JSON, or JSONP, structured for scripted retrieval, institutional dashboards, or integration into a local CRIS or research-information system rather than one-off manual lookups.
Queryable parameters mirror the web interface and then some: keyword search with AND/OR/NOT boolean operators, principal investigator or co-PI name, program officer name, NSF directorate/division codes, awardee name and location, performance location, award ID, an institution’s Unique Entity Identifier (UEI), CFDA/assistance-listing number, estimated-amount and funds-obligated ranges, and award, start, and expiration dates. Pagination uses rpp (results per page, capped at 25) and offset parameters, and — as with the web interface — a single search tops out at 3,000 results, so a full institutional extract typically means paging through multiple requests rather than one call.
Exporting results in bulk
The web interface itself supports exporting up to 3,000 results immediately in CSV, XML, Excel, or plain-text format directly from a search results page, without needing to write any API code — usually the faster route for a one-off pull, such as an institution’s full NSF award history for an internal report. For ongoing or very large-scale extraction beyond that per-search cap, the API’s pagination parameters are the more reliable path.
Why research administrators use NSF Award Search
In practice, NSF Award Search shows up in several recurring research-administration tasks:
- Prior and current support verification — confirming what NSF funding an investigator already holds, for current-and-pending-support disclosures or before submitting a new, potentially overlapping proposal.
- Competitive and landscape analysis — seeing what a given NSF directorate or program has already funded in a research area before an investigator commits time to a proposal in that space.
- Funding-history documentation — pulling an institution’s or a PI’s full NSF award history for internal reporting, biosketch preparation, or a promotion/tenure dossier.
- Portfolio and trend analysis — grants offices and research-development staff tracking how a directorate’s funding by program shifts across fiscal years.
- Verifying award details after an award notice — confirming the officially recorded award number, amount, or awardee-of-record matches what the institution has on file.
Because Award Search’s project and person data function much like a public, read-only research information system for NSF’s own award portfolio, the same conceptual building blocks used across CRIS infrastructure apply: a project record, a person record for the PI, and the funding relationship tying the two together, the way an institutional CRIS or a grant management system ties grants, researchers, and awards together internally.
Data freshness and limitations
A few practical caveats worth knowing before relying on Award Search for anything decision-critical: it covers awards made since 1989, so it is not the right tool for pre-1989 NSF funding history; a very recently issued award may take some time to appear as NSF processes the record; the abstract text and amounts reflect what was entered into NSF’s system and may not capture every subsequent amendment as promptly as the internal award file does; and Award Search covers NSF awards specifically — for other US federal science agencies, use that agency’s own award database (for example, NIH RePORTER for NIH awards, or Federal RePORTER for a cross-agency view), and for open, not-yet-awarded funding opportunities, Award Search is the wrong tool entirely (use NSF Funding Search or Grants.gov instead).
Frequently asked questions
Is NSF Award Search the same as NSF Funding Search?
No. NSF Funding Search (program solicitations and Dear Colleague Letters) lists open funding opportunities you can still apply to. NSF Award Search lists NSF projects that have already been awarded — it’s a record of funded research, not a place to find new opportunities. See CASRAI’s NSF Funding Search guide for the opportunity-discovery side.
How do I find all NSF grants awarded to a specific institution?
Use the awardee organization field in Award Search’s Advanced Search, optionally combined with a date range or directorate filter to narrow results; for a full extract rather than a browser query, export the results directly (up to 3,000 at a time) or page through the Award Search API.
Can I search NSF Award Search by award number?
Yes — both the web interface and the API accept a full or partial award number, which is useful when you have a partial number from an award notice or a citation.
Is there an API for NSF award data?
Yes — the NSF Award Search Web API, documented at resources.research.gov and served from api.nsf.gov, returns award data in XML, JSON, or JSONP, with a maximum of 25 results per page (via the rpp parameter) and 3,000 results per search overall.
How far back does NSF Award Search go?
NSF states that Award Search contains a searchable database of NSF-funded projects going back to 1989.
Does NSF Award Search cover SBIR/STTR awards?
Yes — NSF’s Small Business Innovation Research and Small Business Technology Transfer awards are NSF-funded projects like any other and appear in Award Search under their funding program and directorate. See CASRAI’s NSF SBIR/STTR guide for how that program itself works.
For the funding-opportunity side of NSF — program solicitations, Dear Colleague Letters, and how they cross-post to Grants.gov — see CASRAI’s NSF Funding Search guide. For how institutions track and administer awards once received, see Grant Management Systems and the Grants Management cluster overview.
