Problem
Research questions and friction points this paper is trying to address.
funding lifecycle
research funding
data integration
UKRI
Gateway to Research
Demystifying Funding: Reconstructing a Unified Dataset of the UK Funding Lifecycle
🤖 AI Summary
This study addresses the longstanding fragmentation of data across the UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) funding lifecycle—spanning funding opportunities, peer review decisions, and awarded projects—which has hindered systematic analysis of the complete research funding process. For the first time, the authors integrate heterogeneous sources including the Gateway to Research project database, public funding calls, and competitive peer review records from individual research councils. Leveraging multi-source data fusion techniques, they reconcile unstructured text, inconsistent formats, and access-restricted review data to achieve cross-system alignment and reconstruction. The work delivers and openly releases the first unified dataset and accompanying codebase that comprehensively covers the entire UKRI funding pipeline—from call announcement to project outcomes—thereby filling a critical gap in existing literature, which has predominantly focused only on funded projects and their outputs, and enabling holistic, system-level analysis of research funding dynamics.
📝 Abstract
We present a reconstruction of UKRI's Gateway to Research (GtR) database that links funding opportunities to their resulting project proposals through panel meeting outcomes. Unlike existing work that focuses primarily on funded projects and their outcomes, we close the complete funding lifecycle by integrating three previously disconnected data sources: the GtR project database, UKRI funding opportunities, and competitive funding decision records across UKRI's research councils. We describe the technical challenges of data collection, including navigating inconsistent publication formats and restricted access to panel decisions. The resulting dataset enables a holistic interrogation of the entire funding process, from opportunity announcement to research outcomes. We release the database and associated code.
Innovation
Methods, ideas, or system contributions that make the work stand out.
funding lifecycle
data integration
research funding
panel decisions
UKRI
🔎 Similar Papers
No similar papers found.
