Demystifying Funding: Reconstructing a Unified Dataset of the UK Funding Lifecycle
This work addresses the challenge of fragmented funding data for researchers and policymakers in the UK, though it is incremental as it integrates existing sources rather than introducing new methods.
The researchers tackled the problem of disconnected data sources in the UK funding lifecycle by reconstructing a unified dataset that links funding opportunities to project proposals and panel decisions, resulting in a holistic database that enables interrogation of the entire process from announcement to outcomes.
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.