CASRAI Dictionary

Tag: gateway to research

  • MRC Grants Awarded: How to Read the Register

    MRC grants awarded data is published across three separate UKRI sources — Gateway to Research, the legacy Grants on the Web (GOTW) register, and MRC’s board and panel outcomes pages — and reading it correctly for benchmarking means matching each source to a different question: what was funded, who applied, and how competitive each specific panel meeting was.

    The MRC grants awarded register is the collective term for the public funding-decision records that UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) publishes for the Medical Research Council, spanning historical award spreadsheets, a live searchable grants database, and meeting-by-meeting board and panel outcome listings. For research office staff building competitor intelligence or benchmarking their institution’s success against peers, the register is genuinely useful — but only if its structure and its stated caveats are understood before the numbers are used.

    What is the MRC grants awarded register?

    There is no single document called the “MRC grants awarded register” — it is a set of linked publications UKRI maintains under its “What MRC has funded” pages. These cover awarded grants and fellowships from April 2006 to December 2019 as a downloadable spreadsheet, interactive Tableau dashboards for 2022–23 funding decisions, and rolling board and panel outcome listings for funding meetings from 2017 onward, with earlier records held in the UK Government Web Archive.

    Before 2018, MRC referred to this material as “success rates”; UKRI has since folded the reporting into the wider board and panel outcomes format used across all seven research councils. Any benchmarking exercise therefore has to account for a terminology and format change partway through the period being analysed.

    Where to find MRC grants-awarded data: three sources compared

    Three distinct tools hold MRC award data, and each answers a different research-intelligence question. Confusing them is the single most common reading error institutions make when building competitor comparisons.

    Source What it covers Update pattern Best use
    Gateway to Research Full award records once a grant has started, including principal investigator, institution and value, across all UKRI councils Continuous, as grants start Cross-council portfolio and competitor analysis
    Grants on the Web (GOTW) Legacy register of MRC-administered grants, fellowships and training grants, filterable by institution Static; predates the UKRI merger Institution-level historical lookups
    Board and panel outcomes Score out of ten and funding decision for every application discussed at a given meeting Usually within four weeks of each meeting Competitive positioning within a specific funding round
    Archived spreadsheet and success-rate data Award listings April 2006–December 2019 and pre-2018 success-rate summaries Frozen, held on the UK Government Web Archive Long-run trend analysis

    For most benchmarking work, Gateway to Research and the board and panel outcomes pages should be the primary pair: the former gives the awarded portfolio, the latter gives the competitive context each award was won against.

    How to read board and panel outcomes for benchmarking

    MRC scores every application from one to ten, with ten the best, and this scoring structure applies across all types of MRC funding meeting. Applications are then listed in numerical order within blocks according to their median score group and funding decision, according to UKRI’s published board and panel outcomes guidance.

    Outcomes are usually published within four weeks of a meeting, though UKRI notes this can sometimes take longer. Crucially, applications that are unsuccessful after an earlier shortlisting stage are not discussed at the funding meeting and are therefore not included in board and panel outcomes at all — a data-quality point that matters enormously for anyone computing a success rate, since the visible denominator understates total submissions.

    • Score and decision are recorded per application, not per institution, so institution-level rates must be aggregated manually.
    • Shortlisting-stage rejections are invisible in this dataset — factor this into any success-rate calculation.
    • Full award detail (value, abstract, classification) only appears on Gateway to Research once the grant has actually started.

    How to benchmark success rates and competitor institutions correctly

    UKRI states explicitly that funding decisions are made “in circumstances unique to each panel meeting” and that the funding cut-off is dependent on the budget available at that specific meeting — not a fixed quality threshold. UKRI’s guidance is direct: institutions should not compare funding cut-off points made in different meetings, and UKRI will not consider challenges or enquiries based on such comparisons.

    This has a practical consequence for benchmarking: a proposal scoring 7/10 that was funded in a budget-flush round and a proposal scoring 8/10 declined in a tighter round are not evidence that the second panel was harsher. A robust competitor-analysis method therefore favours relative, within-round comparisons — an institution’s share of awards made at a given meeting, or across a given scheme over several rounds — over any single cross-period success-rate percentage pulled from a headline figure.

    Combining Gateway to Research (what was funded), board and panel outcomes (how competitive that round was), and GOTW’s institution filter (a second, independent cross-check for MRC-specific awards) gives a defensible three-source method rather than a single-source snapshot.

    Common questions on reading the MRC register

    How do I search MRC grants awarded by institution?

    Use Grants on the Web (GOTW), the legacy register hosted at gotw.nerc.ac.uk, and filter by “Institution > Medical Research Council (MRC)”; each project links to the full grant record, including principal investigator and value. For more current, cross-council records, Gateway to Research offers the same institution-level filtering.

    Where can I find MRC board and panel outcomes?

    UKRI publishes MRC’s board and panel outcomes in the “What MRC has funded” section of ukri.org, usually within four weeks of each funding meeting. Outcomes list every application discussed, its score out of ten and its funding decision, allowing panel-by-panel benchmarking rather than reliance on one headline figure.

    Is there a live MRC grants search tool?

    Gateway to Research is UKRI’s live, searchable database of funded projects across all seven research councils, updated continuously as grants start. Grants on the Web remains a parallel legacy tool for MRC-administered awards, useful for cross-checking older or training-grant records.

    Can I compare MRC funding cut-off scores between panel meetings?

    No — UKRI explicitly advises against this. Each meeting’s funding cut-off depends solely on the budget available at that specific meeting, not a fixed quality bar, so scores funded in one round and declined in another are not directly comparable as evidence of relative panel rigour.

    Implications for research offices and what happens next

    For research administration and funding-intelligence teams, the practical implication is that MRC grants-awarded data supports rigorous benchmarking only when the three sources are triangulated and UKRI’s own comparability caveats are respected. A single downloaded spreadsheet or a bare success-rate percentage, taken in isolation, will systematically misrepresent competitive position because of the shortlisting-stage exclusion and the meeting-specific funding cut-off.

    UKRI last updated its board and panel outcomes guidance on 3 March 2026 and its “What MRC has funded” summary page on 29 September 2025, and continues to migrate historical reporting into Tableau-based dashboards — most recently for 2025 panel outcomes and attendance. Institutions building recurring funding-intelligence dashboards should expect this format to keep evolving, and should re-check source URLs each reporting cycle rather than hard-coding links to any single spreadsheet. Research administration teams that build this triangulated method once can reuse it across other UKRI councils, since board and panel outcomes reporting now follows a common structure council-wide.

  • UKRI Grant Tracker vs Funding Finder: Which to Use

    The UKRI grant tracker — officially named Gateway to Research (GtR) — is UKRI’s public, post-award database of funded projects, while Funding Finder is the pre-award tool for discovering open competitions. Use GtR to see what has already been funded and by whom; use Funding Finder to find and apply for a live opportunity. Confusing the two wastes time at both ends of the grant lifecycle.

    Gateway to Research is UKRI’s searchable record of research and innovation projects it has already funded, spanning UKRI’s seven research councils, Research England and Innovate UK.

    What Is the UKRI Grant Tracker (Gateway to Research)?

    Gateway to Research (GtR), hosted at gtr.ukri.org, is UKRI’s public gateway onto publicly funded research. It is a retrospective, analytical tool, not a submission portal: researchers, administrators and journalists use it to look up who has already received UKRI funding, for what, and with which collaborators.

    GtR supports structured search syntax rather than a simple keyword box. Search terms can be combined with capitalised Boolean operators — AND, OR, and by implication exclusion logic — and exact phrases can be isolated by wrapping them in quotation marks (for example, “big data”). This makes GtR closer to a bibliometric research tool than a funding-opportunity search engine, and it is the correct destination when the underlying question is “who funds this kind of work” rather than “how do I apply for funding.”

    • Records cover projects across all seven UKRI research councils, Research England and Innovate UK.
    • Each project record can include the funded organisation, the named investigators, and linked outputs where reported.
    • GtR is read-only: it has no application or sign-in function, and cannot be used to submit a bid.

    What Is UKRI Funding Finder and How Does It Differ?

    UKRI Funding Finder, at ukri.org/opportunity, is the live, forward-looking search tool for current and upcoming funding competitions. Where GtR looks backwards at what has already been awarded, Funding Finder looks forwards at what can still be applied for. Each listing states eligibility criteria, assessment approach, and — increasingly — whether the call is open to all applicants or restricted to invited organisations.

    At the time of research for this article, Funding Finder listed 124 open opportunities across UKRI’s councils, spanning fields from quantum computing hardware to obesity research and zero-emission vehicle manufacturing. Listings can be sorted by publication date, opening date or closing date, and results can be followed via an RSS feed for teams monitoring a discipline continuously. Opportunities that closed before 20 September 2020 are not held on the live site; UKRI directs users to the UK Government Web Archive for that historical record — a detail that matters for administrators auditing older award terms.

    Which Tool Should You Use at Each Stage of the Grant Lifecycle?

    The two tools map cleanly onto opposite ends of the grant lifecycle. Funding Finder belongs to the pre-award, opportunity-scouting stage; GtR belongs to the post-award, evidence and landscape-analysis stage. Treating them as interchangeable is the single most common source of wasted searches reported by research office staff.

    Grant lifecycle stage Correct tool Primary purpose Typical user
    Scoping a new proposal Funding Finder Find open competitions, deadlines, eligibility Principal investigators, research development staff
    Benchmarking success rates or prior awards in a field Gateway to Research (GtR) Analyse what UKRI has already funded and where Research strategy and analysis teams
    Preparing and submitting an application UKRI Funding Service Complete, submit and track an application through assessment Applicants and research office administrators
    Identifying potential collaborators or reviewers Gateway to Research (GtR) Search funded projects by investigator or organisation Principal investigators, partnership teams
    Reporting institutional funding landscape to leadership Gateway to Research (GtR) Extract award data and trends across councils Research administrators, PVC Research offices

    In practice, a full application cycle touches all three UKRI digital services in sequence: Funding Finder to find the call, the UKRI Funding Service to submit and monitor the application, and GtR afterwards — both to check the eventual public record of the award and to inform the next round of proposal scoping.

    Where Does the UKRI Funding Service Fit In?

    The UKRI Funding Service, at funding-service.ukri.org, is a third, distinct property that is frequently conflated with both GtR and Funding Finder. It is the sign-in application portal: the system used to prepare, submit and monitor a funding application once a suitable opportunity has been identified via Funding Finder.

    Administrators searching for uk research and innovation ukri funding service are usually trying to reach this sign-in and case-tracking system, not the public search tools. This is a navigational query, and getting the destination wrong at this stage delays submission rather than discovery — a costlier mistake than a slow search on GtR or Funding Finder.

    • Funding Finder — discover the opportunity (no account needed).
    • UKRI Funding Service — sign in, complete the form, submit, and track assessment status (account required).
    • Gateway to Research — see the public record once the award is live (no account needed).

    Common Questions About UKRI’s Grant Tools

    What is the UKRI grant tracker used for?

    The UKRI grant tracker, Gateway to Research, is used to look up already-funded projects across UKRI’s councils, Research England and Innovate UK. Research offices use it for landscape analysis, benchmarking prior awards in a field, and identifying named investigators or partner organisations before submitting a related proposal.

    Is UKRI Funding Finder the same as Gateway to Research?

    No. Funding Finder lists open, forward-looking competitions for researchers still seeking funding, while Gateway to Research is a retrospective public database of projects UKRI has already awarded. They serve opposite ends of the same lifecycle and are maintained as separate services with separate URLs.

    How do I track a UKRI grant after it has been awarded?

    Once a grant is live, its public record — including the funded organisation and lead investigator — typically appears on Gateway to Research. Day-to-day case management, reporting obligations and correspondence for an active award are instead handled through the UKRI Funding Service account, not GtR.

    Do I need an account to search UKRI Funding Finder?

    No account is required to browse or search Funding Finder listings, including filtering by opening or closing date. An account on the separate UKRI Funding Service is only required at the point of actually starting, saving or submitting an application.

    Key Takeaways for Research Administrators

    The practical rule is straightforward: search Funding Finder for what can still be won, consult Gateway to Research for what has already been won, and use the UKRI Funding Service to actually submit and manage the application in between. Bookmarking all three separately — rather than treating “the UKRI grant tracker” as a single catch-all site — removes the single most common navigation error research offices report when supporting first-time applicants.

    As UKRI continues to consolidate its digital services, research administration teams should expect closer integration between these platforms, but the underlying separation of pre-award discovery, application management and post-award transparency is unlikely to disappear, since each serves a distinct statutory and operational purpose. Institutions building internal guidance for applicants — as part of broader research administration support — should signpost all three tools explicitly rather than defaulting to whichever one appears first in a search engine.

  • UKRI Funded Projects Database: A Grant Office Guide

    The UKRI funded projects database — published as Gateway to Research (GtR) — is UKRI’s open-data catalogue of more than 170,000 publicly funded research and innovation awards, searchable by funder, organisation and researcher back to January 2006. Grant offices can query it directly, export it, or pull it via two REST APIs to benchmark their own award portfolio, track what competitor institutions are winning, and run first-pass due-diligence checks on prospective partners.

    Gateway to Research is UKRI’s public register of research and innovation awards, built from administrative data held in UKRI’s central Databank and refreshed quarterly under an Open Government Licence.

    What is the UKRI funded projects database?

    Gateway to Research (gtr.ukri.org) is UKRI’s public portal onto the awards administered by its seven research councils, Innovate UK, and a set of cross-council funds. According to UKRI’s own guide to the platform, updated April 2026, GtR publishes research and innovation data on 170,000 funded projects by UKRI where the start date is on or after 1 January 2006. Studentship information is separately available from 1 February 2015.

    The underlying data is sourced from UKRI’s 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 publishes this data quarterly, in the second week of January, April, July and October, and makes it available through a search interface, CSV downloads, and two REST APIs. The whole dataset sits under an Open Government Licence, so grant offices can reuse and republish it without a data-sharing agreement.

    One structural gap matters for benchmarking work: Research England’s funding is not published in GtR, because most of it is allocated as a formula-based block grant rather than through individual competitive awards. Analysts comparing “UKRI funding” across institutions need to source Research England figures separately from its own Data Portal.

    How to use GtR for portfolio benchmarking

    Benchmarking with GtR means comparing your institution’s award count, funded value, and council mix against a self-selected peer group over time. The Overview data for each project — title, abstract, duration, funded value, category and status — gives the raw material; the Organisations tab lets you filter by lead or collaborating institution.

    • Pull all awards where your institution (and named peers) is the lead research organisation, grouped by funder and start year, to chart relative growth or contraction in council income.
    • Break totals down by grant category — research grant, fellowship, training grant, studentship, third-party grant, intramural — since councils apply these inconsistently, and mixing them undetected distorts trend lines.
    • Use the People tab, which publishes ORCID iDs where available, to identify which principal investigators drive a peer institution’s growth in a given scheme.

    Treat “funded value” as a commitment figure, not cash received — the single most common benchmarking error analysts make with GtR exports, covered in full under data caveats below.

    How to track competitor institutions in GtR

    Competitor tracking is the same query pattern as benchmarking, run continuously against a fixed watchlist rather than as a one-off snapshot. Set up a standing GtR API pull — or a saved search re-run each quarterly update — against your named competitor institutions.

    This surfaces what a research office actually needs: which schemes a rival is winning that you are not, which external organisations appear repeatedly as their collaborating partners, and which researchers are entering new fields, visible via shifts in project abstracts and outcome types such as spin-outs, IP disclosures and policy-influence entries. Because GtR refreshes on a fixed quarterly cycle, building the pull around the January, April, July and October windows keeps intelligence current without daily polling.

    What GtR can — and cannot — tell you for due diligence

    GtR is a legitimate, free first-pass source for verifying a prospective partner’s funding track record before a formal due-diligence process begins. It can confirm whether an organisation has previously held UKRI awards, what scale of funding it has managed, which UKRI-funded collaborators it has worked with, and whether disclosed outcomes (publications, spin-outs, IP) match what the partner has claimed.

    It cannot replace a full due-diligence check. GtR does not publish security-sensitive review outcomes, does not flag active investigations, and — per UKRI’s own publication rules — excludes any project flagged “Do Not Publish” or awaiting a funder assignment. UKRI requires offices entering international collaborations to run their own structured due-diligence process; bodies such as the Association of Research Managers and Administrators (ARMA) publish separate questionnaires for that purpose. GtR data should feed into that process as one evidence source, not replace it.

    Data caveats every grant office must check before citing GtR figures

    UKRI’s own guide to Gateway to Research — last reviewed in October 2022 and updated again in April 2026 — documents several data-quality limits that most secondary coverage of GtR omits. Any office using GtR figures in a board paper, funding bid, or competitor briefing should check these before publishing a number.

    Caveat What it means for your analysis
    3.6% of projects excluded UKRI confirms 3.6% of projects are withheld from GtR as “Do Not Publish” or pending funder identification — totals will always undercount true award volume slightly.
    No unique organisation IDs UKRI does not hold a single identifier across its constituent systems, so the same institution can appear under multiple name variants — counts of organisations are “likely to be overestimated.”
    Funded value ≠ actual spend “Funded value” reflects the commitment made when a project was approved, drawn down over time — not cash disbursed. Innovate UK figures further split “project cost” from the smaller “grant offer” actually paid.
    Region reflects admin HQ, not research site Organisation region is based on the lead applicant’s postcode, which overrepresents administrative hubs (London, Oxford, Cambridge) relative to where research is actually conducted.
    Classifications inconsistent across funders UKRI’s own guide warns that classification fields are applied inconsistently between councils and should be avoided for cross-funder trend analysis.

    The April 2026 refresh also reclassified a batch of awards previously attributed to the wrong funder: projects delivered through UKRI-managed programmes — including the Advanced Propulsion Centre, the Aerospace Technology Institute and the Centre for Connected and Autonomous Vehicles — were moved from Innovate UK’s totals to their correct designated funder. Any benchmarking series built before this update should be re-pulled rather than trusted as a like-for-like comparison.

    Answer-first Q&A: UKRI funding data

    What are the 7 research councils?

    UKRI’s seven research councils are AHRC (arts and humanities), BBSRC (biotechnology and biological sciences), EPSRC (engineering and physical sciences), ESRC (economic and social research), MRC (medical research), NERC (environment) and STFC (science and technology facilities). GtR’s Funder field lets you filter awards by any of these seven, plus Innovate UK and cross-council funds.

    How difficult is it to get a research grant?

    GtR does not publish success rates directly, so difficulty must be inferred: divide funded projects in a scheme by known applicant volume from the relevant council’s own reporting. Grant offices typically combine GtR’s funded-award data with council-published statistics — since success-rate data is not stored in GtR itself — for an accurate competitiveness picture.

    Did research funding get cut?

    GtR is the most reliable independent way to check funding-cut claims, since it shows actual awards made rather than budget announcements. Comparing quarterly totals for a council or scheme year-on-year in GtR — rather than relying on press coverage — lets a research office verify whether award volume genuinely fell or simply shifted between funders, as happened with the April 2026 reclassification.

    What this means for research offices

    UKRI invests roughly £8 billion of public money a year across its councils and Innovate UK, and GtR is the only complete, machine-readable public record of where that money has actually landed. Offices that build a standing, API-driven pull against GtR — refreshed each quarterly update — gain a benchmarking and competitor-tracking capability most peers still assemble manually from PDFs.

    The practical requirement is discipline about the caveats above: treat funded value as commitment, not spend; deduplicate organisation names before counting; and re-pull historical series after each quarterly refresh to catch reclassifications like April 2026’s. Applied with those checks, GtR data is a credible, citable input into a research office’s own due-diligence and strategy work, consistent with the evidence expectations shaping wider research administration practice.