UKRI’s Gateway to Research (GtR) is the free, open database of research and innovation projects funded by UK Research and Innovation since 2006, covering roughly 170,000 awards. Research administrators use it to track funded projects, benchmark peer institutions and pull evidence for institutional and REF-style reporting, without needing a login or a data-sharing agreement.
Gateway to Research is UKRI’s public search and analysis portal for administrative data on publicly funded UK research and innovation, refreshed quarterly from UKRI’s central Databank. It is distinct from UKRI’s funding finder, which lists open funding calls rather than completed or active awards — a distinction covered in detail below.
- What is UKRI’s Gateway to Research?
- How do you search Gateway to Research for funded projects?
- Gateway to Research vs the UKRI funding finder: which tool do you need?
- Using GtR data for institutional benchmarking and reporting
- Data limitations every research administrator should know
- Frequently asked questions
What is UKRI’s Gateway to Research?
Gateway to Research (GtR) is the open portal UKRI built to make its funding data visible and searchable by the public. It draws on administrative records held in UKRI’s Databank, sourced from the Innovation Funding Service, the UKRI Funding Service, the Joint Electronic Submission (Je-S) system, off-system project records, and an annual outcomes collection run through a service provided by Elsevier.
UKRI’s own guidance confirms GtR covers 170,000 funded projects with start dates on or after 1 January 2006, with UKRI-funded studentship information available from 1 February 2015 onwards. The site is built on open source, open standards and an Open Government Licence, so both the interface and the underlying code are free to reuse.
Coverage spans the seven research councils — AHRC, BBSRC, EPSRC, ESRC, MRC, NERC and STFC — plus Innovate UK and a growing number of UKRI-managed delivery programmes. Research England funding is a notable exception: because most of its money is allocated as a block grant rather than project-by-project, it is not published in GtR.
How do you search Gateway to Research for funded projects?
GtR supports a keyword search from its homepage, refined by side-panel facets rather than a single advanced-search form. This makes it fast to move from a broad topic to a specific award once you know which filters to combine.
- Use double quotes for an exact phrase, for example “open access monitoring”.
- Combine terms with AND, OR and NOT (uppercase) to broaden or narrow results.
- Filter by funder (e.g. EPSRC, MRC), project category, start year, region and lead research organisation.
- Open a project record to see the abstract, funded value, duration, collaborating organisations, named investigators and, where available, ORCID iDs and linked publications.
Each project page also links to a “related projects” tab, which is essential when an award has been transferred between organisations, since GtR issues a new reference suffix (/2, /3, and so on) for each transfer rather than overwriting the original record.
Gateway to Research vs the UKRI funding finder: which tool do you need?
These two UKRI tools are frequently confused because both sit under ukri.org and gtr.ukri.org, but they answer opposite questions. GtR looks backwards at what has already been funded; the funding finder looks forwards at what is currently open for application.
| Feature | Gateway to Research (GtR) | UKRI funding finder |
|---|---|---|
| Purpose | Search historical and active funded projects | Search currently open funding opportunities |
| URL | gtr.ukri.org | ukri.org/opportunity |
| Data scope | ~170,000 awards from 1 Jan 2006 onwards | Live calls only, replaced as deadlines close |
| Update frequency | Quarterly (second week of Jan, Apr, Jul, Oct) | Continuous, as calls open and close |
| Typical user | Research administrators, analysts, developers | Applicants seeking funding |
If your task is to benchmark what a peer institution has already won, GtR is the correct source. If the task is to identify a call to apply to, the funding finder — not GtR — is the tool you need.
Using GtR data for institutional benchmarking and reporting
Research offices use GtR as a free alternative to commercial funding-intelligence platforms for lightweight benchmarking. Filtering by lead research organisation and funder produces a portfolio view of a competitor institution’s award count, funded value and subject spread without a subscription.
Two structural details matter for reporting accuracy. First, funded value reflects commitment, not spend — it is the amount UKRI approved at award stage, drawn down over the project’s life, so it should not be equated with cash disbursed in a given reporting year. Second, since October 2025 all awards issued via the UKRI Funding Service carry a “UKRI” prefix in their award identifier (for example, UKRI127, replacing the previous numeric-only format), which affects how administrators cross-reference internal grant codes against GtR records.
The People and Publications tabs also make GtR useful for tracking named investigators across institutions and linking outputs to ORCID iDs, supporting the kind of contributor-and-output reporting that research administration offices are increasingly asked to produce for funders and league-table submissions.
Data limitations every research administrator should know
UKRI’s own data guide, last substantively updated for the April 2026 refresh, sets out limitations that should sit alongside any figure pulled from GtR:
- Exclusions: 3.6% of projects are excluded from publication, either flagged “Do Not Publish” or awaiting funder identification.
- Duplicate organisations and people: UKRI lacks unique identifiers across all its source systems, so the same institution or researcher can appear under multiple names — any headcount or organisation count is likely an overestimate.
- Regional attribution: project region is based on the lead applicant’s postcode, not where the research is actually carried out, which tends to overrepresent administrative hubs such as London, Oxford and Cambridge.
- Classification inconsistency: UKRI advises against using its project categories for trend analysis across funders, as classification rules are not applied consistently.
Developers can also query GtR programmatically through two public APIs, though UKRI describes the API as currently unsupported and recommends building request delays and cache-busting parameters into any automated pipeline that pages through results.
Frequently asked questions
Is UKRI’s Gateway to Research free to use?
Yes. GtR is open and free for all users, built on open source, open standards and an Open Government Licence. Both the website and its underlying data and code can be reused by third parties, including through UKRI’s public API, without a subscription or login.
How often is Gateway to Research data updated?
GtR refreshes on a quarterly cycle, scheduled for the second week of January, April, July and October. Each release pulls the latest snapshot from UKRI’s central Databank, so figures can lag real-time award decisions by up to three months.
What is the difference between Gateway to Research and the UKRI funding finder?
GtR is a retrospective database of funded and active projects since 2006; the funding finder is a live listing of open calls. Use GtR to see what has been awarded, and the funding finder to find opportunities to apply for.
Can I access Gateway to Research data through an API?
Yes. UKRI provides two public APIs for programmatic access, though they are officially unsupported. UKRI recommends paging through results with built-in delays and using cache-busting query parameters to avoid stale error responses.
As UKRI continues to consolidate its systems — including folding new studentship data into GtR from mid-2026 — the dataset is likely to become more consistent, though the underlying caution around duplicate organisation names and commitment-versus-spend figures will remain relevant for any institution using GtR as an evidence source in formal reporting.
