Researchfish is an online research-outcomes reporting platform, not a citation-discovery
or literature-search tool. Grant holders use it to submit self-reported outcomes —
publications, collaborations, further funding, commercial and policy impact, and more —
against specific funded awards, and research funders use the aggregated returns to track
what their money produced. It is the mechanism most UK research administrators mean when
they talk about “reporting to UKRI” or “doing my Researchfish return.”
As of mid-2026, Researchfish is also in a genuinely unusual position: its owner, Elsevier,
announced on 30 January 2026 that it will close the platform on 31 July 2027. The reporting
obligation to funders isn’t going away, but the platform used to fulfil it is a confirmed
moving target for the next year — this guide covers both the obligation as it stands today
and what’s known about the transition ahead.
What Researchfish is (and isn’t)
Researchfish began as a Medical Research Council (MRC) project in 2008, was taken on by
the higher-education software company Interfolio in 2019, and was acquired by the academic
publisher Elsevier in 2022, which markets it today as part of its research-intelligence
product line alongside Scopus and SciVal. Functionally, it’s a submission portal:
researchers create an account, connect it to their funded awards, and enter outcome data
against a standard set of questions once a year (with the option to update continuously).
It is easy to confuse with tools covered elsewhere on this site that also touch a
researcher’s output record — ORCID, a
CRIS/RIM platform, or a literature-discovery tool like
Semantic Scholar or OpenAlex — but the function is different. Those tools help someone find,
identify, or cross-reference research and researchers. Researchfish exists specifically so a
funder can ask “what did this grant actually produce?” and get a structured, comparable
answer across an entire portfolio of awards.
Which funders require Researchfish reporting
Researchfish is used by more than 90 research funders, most of them UK-based. The
largest and most consequential for UK research administrators are:
- UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) — across its constituent research
councils, the primary funder driving Researchfish’s scale in UK higher education. - National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) — operates its
own sanctions policy alongside UKRI’s. - Cancer Research UK — withholds grant payments to the host institution
for a missed or invalid submission. - Wellcome Trust — used Researchfish through the 2025/26 submission
round (closing March 2026) but has announced it will not continue using the platform beyond
that point (see below). - Other funders including the British Heart Foundation, the British Council, and a range
of medical research charities and international funders.
A deliberate design feature of the platform is that a researcher enters an output once
and can attribute it to every relevant grant from every funder that uses Researchfish,
rather than re-entering the same publication or collaboration separately for each funder’s
own system.
The grantee reporting obligation
For UKRI awards specifically, submitting an annual outcomes update is normally a
condition written into the grant or fellowship’s terms and conditions, not an optional
courtesy. The obligation falls on the named lead researcher (principal investigator), runs
“from early in your project until at least five years after it ends,” and is collected
during an annual submission window — for example, UKRI’s 2026 window ran from 2 February to
12 March 2026. Outside the formal window, researchers can still update their record
continuously.
Non-compliance carries real consequences, not just a reminder email. Per UKRI’s own
published guidance, a researcher who misses their Researchfish submission:
- becomes ineligible to be named as Principal Investigator or Co-Investigator on any
further UKRI award, across every UKRI council, until all outstanding submissions are made;
and - if the award in question is still active, has payments on that award withheld until an
up-to-date outcomes record is submitted.
NIHR and Cancer Research UK operate comparable sanctions policies — CRUK withholds
institutional payments for a missing or invalid return, and NIHR can render a PI ineligible
for further funding — though each funder’s exact policy and exemption criteria should be
checked directly rather than assumed to match UKRI’s.
What gets reported: the Common Question Set
The UK research councils harmonised their outcome-reporting questions into a shared
framework generally referred to as the Common Question Set — reportedly
around 16 main outcome categories broken into roughly 103 sub-types, applied consistently
across disciplines so a funder can compare returns from an engineering grant and a medical
humanities grant on the same structure. The main categories a grant holder is asked about
include:
- Publications — journal articles, books, and other scholarly outputs,
increasingly harvested automatically from connected repositories rather than entered by
hand. - Collaborations and partnerships — formal and informal research
relationships that arose from the funded work. - Further funding — follow-on grants or awards secured on the strength of
the funded project. - Engagement activities / Public Engagement and Involvement (PE&I) —
public- and patient-facing dissemination and involvement work. - Influence on policy, practice, patients, and the public — evidence of
the research shaping decisions or services outside academia. - IP and licensing, and spin-outs — commercialisation outcomes; UKRI’s
spin-out reporting now aligns to the UK Spinout Register’s definition. - Products, research tools and methods, and artistic or creative outputs
— tangible outputs beyond a conventional publication. - Researcher and staff development, and next destination — the training
and career outcomes for people employed on the grant.
Every outcome category also carries a free-text field for an impact
narrative — the researcher’s own account of why a given output or collaboration
mattered, in plain language rather than a metric. UKRI ran a reporting-burden review across
2025 into 2026 that trimmed and reorganised parts of this question set (for example,
folding “Awards and recognition” and “Use of facilities and resources” out of mandatory
reporting and restructuring public engagement into a dedicated ten-question section) — the
exact question set a grant holder sees can shift year to year, so it’s worth re-reading the
current guidance rather than relying on a prior year’s form from memory.
Why funders use aggregated Researchfish data
A single funder like UKRI runs thousands of active grants at once. Researchfish exists
because asking each grant holder individually, in whatever format they choose, doesn’t
scale into anything a funder can analyse, compare, or report upward. Aggregating structured
returns across a whole portfolio lets a funder:
- assess the outcomes and impact of its investment at a portfolio level —
across a whole scheme, discipline, or funding call, not just one grant at a time; - meet its own accountability obligations to government, donors, or trustees — UKRI’s
figures describe funders collectively reporting on tens of billions of pounds in funding to
government and other stakeholders using Researchfish-sourced data; - publish outcome information openly — for UKRI-funded work, submitted outcomes surface
publicly through Gateway to
Research, UKRI’s public database of funded projects and their outputs.
Researchfish data has also fed into academic research on research assessment itself — a
published proof-of-concept study linked REF
impact case studies from the 2014 Research Excellence Framework to the underpinning
grants recorded in Researchfish, matching primarily via publication identifiers, to explore
which funding characteristics correlate with impact case studies. It’s worth being precise
about what this does and doesn’t mean: Researchfish is not itself part of the official REF
submission mechanism (impact case studies are submitted separately by institutions to
Research England), but its portfolio-level data has proven useful as an analytical resource
for understanding how funded research translates into recognised impact. See CASRAI’s
dictionary entries on pathway to impact and
impact evaluation for the broader vocabulary
this connects to.
Researchfish’s planned closure: what grant holders need to know
On 30 January 2026, Elsevier announced it will sunset Researchfish on 31 July 2027,
saying the move lets it “focus on solutions that better align with customers’ needs.” The
platform had faced years of researcher criticism over its usability — a 2024 UK government
review of research bureaucracy described it as “burdensome for users” and said it “does not
make the best use of recent technological advances.” Elsevier states the platform will
remain fully supported and operational until the closure date, with data retained for 12
months after each individual funder’s contract with Researchfish ends.
The timing is notable: UKRI renewed its own Researchfish contract, following a
competitive tender that reportedly found no viable alternative at the time, only months
before the closure was announced. That leaves UKRI and Researchfish’s other 90-plus funders
with a defined but tight window — commentary in the sector has described it as roughly 18
months from the announcement to close — to agree on and build a replacement, individually or
collectively, before mid-2027.
Wellcome Trust reached its own decision independently: it will not use Researchfish
beyond the 2025/26 submission round (which closed in March 2026) and is developing its own
outcomes-reporting tool instead. As of mid-2026, no confirmed successor system has been
announced by UKRI or most of the other affected funders.
What this means practically, right now: the underlying obligation to
report your outcomes to your funder has not changed and shouldn’t be treated as suspended —
continue meeting your current Researchfish submission windows exactly as before. What’s
worth watching over the next 12–18 months is your specific funder’s own communications about
a successor platform, since the transition (if it happens funder-by-funder rather than
through a shared solution) could mean re-entering historical outcome data into a new system.
Keeping your own independent record of what you’ve reported — beyond what Researchfish
itself retains — is a reasonable precaution given the confirmed data-deletion policy after a
funder’s contract ends.
Practical guidance for grant holders and research administrators
- Know your submission window. It’s set annually by the platform/funder
combination and can move year to year (UKRI’s 2026 window closed 12 March 2026) — check
current guidance rather than assuming last year’s dates. - Use the “report once” design deliberately. If more than one of your
funders uses Researchfish, a single entered output can be attributed to every relevant
grant rather than re-keyed per funder. - Track your funder’s specific sanctions policy. UKRI, NIHR, and Cancer
Research UK each publish their own — the consequences (payment withholding, PI ineligibility)
are broadly similar but not identical, and eligibility exemptions differ. - Keep independent records. Don’t rely on Researchfish as your
institution’s permanent archive of reported outcomes, particularly with a confirmed closure
date on the calendar and a 12-month post-contract data-deletion policy already in place. - Watch for successor-platform announcements from your specific funders
between now and July 2027, rather than assuming continuity with the current system.
Frequently asked questions
Is Researchfish mandatory?
For UKRI grant and fellowship holders, yes — annual outcomes reporting via Researchfish
is normally a condition of the award’s terms and conditions, unless the researcher holds a
specific exemption. Many other funders that use Researchfish, including NIHR and Cancer
Research UK, treat it as mandatory too, each under its own sanctions policy.
What happens if I don’t submit my Researchfish return?
For UKRI awards, a missed submission makes the named lead researcher ineligible to be PI
or Co-I on any further UKRI award, across all UKRI councils, until every outstanding
submission is made — and if the current award is still active, payments on it can be
withheld until the outcomes record is up to date. Other funders that use Researchfish apply
comparable sanctions.
How long after my grant ends do I have to keep reporting?
For UKRI awards, the obligation runs from early in the project until at least five years
after the award ends.
Is Researchfish closing?
Yes. Elsevier announced on 30 January 2026 that it will close Researchfish on 31 July
2027. The platform remains fully operational and supported until that date, but funders —
including UKRI, which had recently renewed its contract — are now working out what replaces
it.
Does Wellcome Trust still use Researchfish?
Wellcome used Researchfish through its 2025/26 submission round, which closed in March
2026, and has said it will not continue using the platform beyond that point, opting instead
to develop its own reporting tool.
Is Researchfish the same as ORCID or a CRIS?
No. ORCID is a persistent identifier for an
individual researcher; a CRIS/RIM platform is
institutional infrastructure for managing research information generally. Researchfish is
narrower and funder-facing: a reporting portal a grant holder uses specifically to tell a
funder what a particular funded award produced. An institution’s CRIS may separately import
or reference Researchfish outcome data, but the two systems serve different primary
purposes.
Related CASRAI resources
Researchfish returns sit alongside other grant-reporting instruments in CASRAI’s
Dictionary — see annual report (grant),
interim report,
final report, and
reporting period (grant) for the
broader vocabulary of funder reporting obligations. For the identifier and research
information infrastructure that outcomes reporting connects to, see the
persistent identifiers and research information systems
cluster; for the wider grants lifecycle, see the
grants management cluster.
