CASRAI Dictionary

Tag: ukri grant search

  • 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.

  • EPSRC Grants on the Web: Practical Search Guide

    EPSRC Grants on the Web is a legacy name for the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council’s public grant records, which today live inside UKRI’s Gateway to Research (GtR) — not a standalone EPSRC portal. Research administrators who search “EPSRC grants on the web” are usually looking for pipeline intelligence — who has been funded, at what value, on what panel — and that data is now accessed through GtR’s project, person, organisation and publication search tabs, with facets and Boolean syntax most users never open.

    EPSRC Grants on the Web is the name research administrators still use for EPSRC’s public record of funded projects, even though EPSRC itself no longer runs a separate database under that title. UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) — the body that has governed EPSRC since its formation in April 2018 from a merger of seven UK research councils, Research England and Innovate UK — now reports funding data centrally through Gateway to Research. This guide explains where the old records went, how to run an effective search across UKRI’s award database, and which search fields administrators most often overlook.

    What is EPSRC Grants on the Web?

    EPSRC Grants on the Web is a defined term: a public register of grants awarded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, historically published as a searchable database in its own right and now consolidated into UKRI’s cross-council Gateway to Research service. The phrase persists in search behaviour and in older bookmarks, guidance documents and institutional wikis, but the underlying dataset is maintained centrally by UKRI rather than by EPSRC alone.

    For funding decisions made before 2018, EPSRC’s historic “funding rates” data — what the council called success and funding rates prior to the UKRI merger — sits in the UK Government Web Archive rather than in any live, searchable interface. That distinction matters for benchmarking: pre-2018 figures require an archive lookup, not a GtR query.

    Where did EPSRC’s “Grants on the Web” go?

    EPSRC’s council-specific funding page on ukri.org — last updated 29 September 2025 — directs users to Gateway to Research (gtr.ukri.org) for “research and training grants funded by EPSRC,” alongside a Tableau dashboard of panel outcomes. There is no standalone “EPSRC Grants on the Web” URL left to bookmark; the consolidation happened as UKRI centralised funding reporting across its research councils.

    This is a genuine source of confusion in the sector, because not every council followed the same path. NERC still operates its own distinct “Grants on the Web” portal at gotw.nerc.ac.uk, separate from Gateway to Research. Administrators who assume EPSRC has an equivalent standalone tool will end up on an archived or dead link instead of the live dataset.

    • EPSRC-funded projects, people and organisations: searchable live via Gateway to Research.
    • EPSRC panel outcomes and funding application results: a dedicated Tableau dashboard, linked from ukri.org.
    • Pre-2018 EPSRC funding/success rates: UK Government Web Archive snapshot only.
    • NERC awards: a separate, still-branded “Grants on the Web” portal at gotw.nerc.ac.uk.

    How do you search UKRI’s award database for EPSRC awards?

    Gateway to Research is built on Elasticsearch and Apache Lucene, so it supports full Boolean and field-level search syntax that most casual users never invoke. To find EPSRC awards specifically, run a keyword search and then apply the “Funder” facet to restrict results to EPSRC — the same mechanism works for MRC, NERC, BBSRC, ESRC, AHRC, STFC, Research England and Innovate UK, since all sit inside the same index.

    The search fields research administrators most often miss are the ones below the basic keyword box:

    • Quoted phrases — wrapping a term in quotation marks (e.g. "quantum sensing") matches the exact phrase rather than the individual words, which cuts noise dramatically on common technical terms.
    • Boolean operators — AND, OR and NOT must be capitalised to function; lower-case “and” is treated as a stray keyword, not an operator.
    • Wildcards — a question mark (?) matches a single character and an asterisk (*) matches zero or more, useful for catching spelling variants across a large grant corpus.
    • Fuzzy and proximity search — a tilde after a term (test~0.8) finds near-matches; a tilde after a quoted phrase ("test blood"~10) finds terms within a set word distance of each other.
    • Resource-type tabs — Projects, Persons, Organisations and Publications each expose a different advanced-search form, so a search run on the Projects tab will not surface matching Person or Organisation records by default.
    • Facets — ordered alphabetically and additive; selecting facets across categories (funder, scheme, research topic, lead organisation) narrows a result set, but switching tabs clears facets from the previous search.

    For institutional benchmarking, combine a funder facet (EPSRC) with an organisation facet and a date range, then bookmark the query URL — GtR search results are shareable by link, useful for a live funding-strategy dashboard rather than a static export.

    How does EPSRC’s data compare with MRC, NERC and BBSRC?

    Not every UKRI council presents its award data the same way. The table below summarises where each dataset actually lives, which is the detail administrators need before writing a search strategy that spans more than one funder.

    Council Primary live database Legacy/standalone portal Notes
    EPSRC Gateway to Research (gtr.ukri.org) None — retired into GtR Panel outcomes tracked separately via Tableau; pre-2018 rates in the Government Web Archive
    MRC Gateway to Research (gtr.ukri.org) None — retired into GtR MRC award and studentship data reported through the same GtR index as EPSRC
    NERC Gateway to Research (gtr.ukri.org) gotw.nerc.ac.uk (“Grants on the Web”) NERC still runs a dedicated legacy portal alongside GtR
    BBSRC Gateway to Research (gtr.ukri.org) Referenced as “Grants on the Web” in search behaviour, no dedicated live URL Council-specific funding page links back to GtR

    A single, correctly faceted Gateway to Research query will retrieve EPSRC, MRC, BBSRC and most other UKRI council awards from one interface — but anyone chasing NERC records should also check gotw.nerc.ac.uk, since it is not a simple synonym for GtR.

    Answer-first Q&A

    What is an EPSRC grant?

    An EPSRC grant is a funding award made by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council to support research or training in engineering, mathematics, physical sciences and related disciplines. Awards are assessed at panel meetings, recorded centrally by UKRI, and searchable through Gateway to Research alongside awards from every other UKRI council.

    What is the EPSRC standard grant?

    The EPSRC standard grant is EPSRC’s core responsive-mode funding route, supporting investigator-led research proposals that fall within the council’s engineering and physical sciences remit. It sits alongside programme grants, fellowships and other UKRI application routes, and outcomes for standard-grant applications appear in the same panel-outcomes Tableau dashboard as other EPSRC schemes.

    Who is eligible for EPSRC funding?

    Eligibility for EPSRC funding generally requires an applicant to be based at an eligible UK research organisation and to hold, or be applying for, a role recognised by UKRI as suitable for a principal or co-investigator. Exact eligibility rules vary by funding scheme, so administrators should check the specific opportunity’s guidance on ukri.org before assuming a route applies.

    Are UKRI and EPSRC the same?

    No — UKRI and EPSRC are not the same body. UKRI is the umbrella organisation formed in 2018 that brings together seven research councils (including EPSRC and MRC), Research England and Innovate UK. EPSRC is one constituent council operating under UKRI’s governance, which is why EPSRC’s award data now reports through UKRI’s shared Gateway to Research rather than a council-only system.

    What this means for research administrators

    Treating “EPSRC Grants on the Web” as a live, separate URL wastes time chasing archived or dead pages. The efficient workflow is to query Gateway to Research directly, apply the EPSRC funder facet, and layer in Boolean, wildcard or proximity syntax when a common technical term returns too much noise. Institutions building funding-pipeline dashboards for research administration teams should bookmark faceted GtR query URLs rather than static exports, since the index updates as new awards are recorded.

    As UKRI continues centralising reporting across its councils, expect fewer standalone legacy portals to survive outside NERC’s. Administrators who build benchmarking habits around GtR’s search syntax now will not need to relearn an interface if NERC’s “Grants on the Web” is eventually folded into the same system.