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Demystifying Funding: Reconstructing a Unified Dataset of the UK Funding Lifecycle

William Thorne, Rupert Shepherd, Diana Maynard

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.

Demystifying Funding: Reconstructing a Unified Dataset of the UK Funding Lifecycle

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.

Paper Structure

This paper contains 28 sections, 1 equation, 3 figures, 5 tables.

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Related Work
  3. GtR as a Research Data Source
  4. Data Quality and Reporting Concerns
  5. Funding Fairness and Transparency
  6. Linking Funding Opportunities, Meetings and Outcomes
  7. Data Sources
  8. Gateway to Research
  9. Funding Opportunities
  10. Panel Meeting Outcomes and Attendance
  11. Metadata Extraction from Opportunities
  12. Hierarchical Retrieval
  13. Evaluation
  14. Error Analysis
  15. Data Extraction and Alignment
  16. ...and 13 more sections

Figures (3)

  • Figure 1: Simplified database schema. Tables are coloured according to primary entity: meeting/panel/opportunity (blue), project (green), people (purple), organisations (teal), outcomes (orange), link tables (grey).
  • Figure 2: Number of meetings extracted per council over time.
  • Figure 3: Breakdown of test samples by funding organisation. Samples were selected proportional to their total occurrence in the full dataset.