Guidance

A guide to Gateway to Research

From:
UKRI
Published:

This page provides a guide to the data in the Gateway to Research (GtR) website, published by UK Research and Innovation (UKRI).

The key areas covered in this guide are:

  • data coverage
  • sources
  • limitations
  • publication rules
  • data considerations
  • usage guidelines
  • accessing the data via the application programming interface (API)
  • frequently asked questions

We developed GtR to make research and innovation visible and open to the public. We want to enable users to search and analyse information about publicly funded research and innovation from UKRI.

Data is published to GtR quarterly and is scheduled to update in the second week of January, April, July and October.

Gateway to Research data coverage

GtR publishes research and innovation data on 170,000 funded projects by UKRI where the start date is on or after 1 January 2006.

Information about UKRI-funded students, associated with UKRI training grants, is only available from 1 February 2015. UKRI-funded student information is available after 1 February 2015 in the ‘related projects’ tab associated with the training grant.

Research England data is currently not published in GtR, as the majority of its funding is allocated by formula as a block grant. Find out more on the Research England Data Portal.

Where available, we publish the outcomes of UKRI projects using data collected through a service provided by Elsevier. This data is published annually in July and reflects submissions from the most recent reporting period, which closed in March 2025.

Data sources

The data published is based on the data held in Databank which is the UKRI central repository of administrative data.

Administrative data is information gathered primarily for operational purposes, such as managing applications or distributing funding. Data comes from multiple systems, including:

  • Innovation Funding Service (IFS)
  • UKRI Funding Service
  • Joint Electronic Submission (Je-S) system
  • off-system projects
  • outcomes collections using a service provided by Elsevier

The databank team have worked across UKRI to improve the quality and usability of data.

Before the data is published on the GtR website publication rules are applied to ensure consistency and quality.

Publication rules

We apply a series of publication rules to the data before publishing to the website. The rules were last reviewed in October 2022 to ensure they are still relevant and working as expected.

These rules are in place to ensure UKRI is transparent while still adhering to its data privacy obligations, data validation, and the terms and conditions of the funding opportunity.

This means that 3.6% of projects have been excluded from GtR due to the project being flagged as ‘Do Not Publish’ or they are waiting a funder to be identified.

There are further exclusions based on the publication rules:

  • projects starting on or after 1 January 2006
  • studentships starting on or after 1 February 2015
  • people are excluded if they are not in a specified role

Abstract text replacement

In some cases, we replace project abstracts with standard placeholder text. This occurs when:

  • the abstract is missing
  • the abstract contains commercially sensitive or personal information, and a replacement has been requested

For all project types (except training grants):

“Abstracts are not currently available in GtR for all funded research. This is normally because the abstract was not required at the time of proposal submission but may be because it included sensitive information such as personal details.”

For training grant abstract:

“Doctoral Training Partnerships: a range of postgraduate training is funded by the research councils. For information on current funding routes see the common terminology.“

These publication rules are essential to ensure that the data shared on GtR is accurate, responsibly managed and aligned with UKRI’s transparency and privacy commitment.

Data published

The data published in GtR is organised into the following key sections, each highlighting different aspects of funded research and innovation projects:

  • overview
  • organisations
  • people
  • publications
  • outcomes

The Overview section contains project details including:

  • project title
  • project abstract
  • duration of the project and the funded value
  • project status
  • project category
  • project reference
  • classification

The Organisations section includes the lead and collaborating research organisations with any project partners that are formally supporting the research and innovation.

In the People section we cover researchers’ role on a project and publish ORCID iDs where available.

In the Publications section we include publications that are a direct result of the funding released. There are links to the publication texts on the website where available.

Outcome data includes descriptions of outputs covering the following areas:

  • artistic and creative products
  • collaboration
  • key findings
  • impact summary
  • further funding
  • engagement activities
  • policy influence
  • research databases and models
  • impact summary
  • software and technical products
  • intellectual property
  • product interventions and clinical trials
  • spin-outs

A data dictionary can be found in Annex A.

Data considerations

The user should be aware that there are limitations on the accuracy, reliability and completeness of the data published in GtR.

Classifications

Classifications are inconsistently applied with no common standards across UKRI.

Avoid using them for trend analysis across funders.

Duplicate organisation names

UKRI does not have unique identifiers across all its constituent systems. This means that organisations may be identified as different when they are in the fact the same.

Any counting of organisations is likely to be overestimated.

Be cautious when aggregating organisation data as multiple entries may represent the same organisation, which can inflate totals or distort trends.

Duplicate people

UKRI does not have unique identifiers across all its constituent systems. This means people may be identified as different when they are in fact the same.

Any counting of unique people is likely to be overestimated.

This lack of standardisation leads to duplication, making it difficult to track individual contributions accurately across projects and funders.

Financial data

It is essential to recognise the differences in how financial figures are reported and what they represent. Not all values reflect actual spend, and misinterpretation can lead to inaccurate conclusions about investment levels.

‘Funded value’ reflects commitment and should not be equated with actual expenditure. This value represents the amount committed by the Funder when the project was approved, which may be drawn down over time. Misinterpreting this could lead to overestimating actual financial activity or impact in a given period.

The funded value for Innovate UK is further broken down on the organisation tab to show both the public and private contributions by Project costs. The Grant offer is only the portion funded by Innovate UK and the participant who received the funding, and is shown as follows:

Lead participant

Start Sort Scale LTD

Project cost: £222,196

Grant offer: £155,538

Participant

Orbital Media and Advertising Limited

Project cost: £267,072

Grant offer: £186,950

These figures should be separated to accurately assess public investment versus the overall project costs when comparing across Funders or analysing investment.

For the project category ‘Intramural’ finances reflect expenditure-to-date, not what has been committed or forecasted. This gives a more accurate picture of financial activity but may underrepresent the full scope of the project if future spend is significant.

Organisation region

The region is based on postcode of the lead applicant. This is not necessarily where research actually occurs.

This may overrepresent regions with administrative headquarters (for example London, Oxford, Cambridge) and underrepresent regions where the actual research is conducted.

See more information on regional spend.

Outcome data

As of May 2025, the seven research councils all collect outcome data using a service provided by Elsevier. The most recent annual outcome collection concluded in April 2025 and the data published on GtR in July 2025. Note that:

  • duplications may occur when different researchers have entered similar information independently of one another
  •  publications may occur from more than one award
  • text fields under 30 characters or referencing another award aren’t published
  • outcomes missing key fields (for example publication author or title, spin-out details) are omitted
  • spin-outs are only published once verified via Companies House

Dates for publication or production of outcomes can be inconsistent with start and end date of their corresponding awards, for example:

  • spin-outs have an established date before the start financial year of the award they are linked to
  •  publications have a publication year at a date which is before the start date of the award they are linked to
  • research tools and methods have a year of production which is earlier than the start date of the award they are linked to

Roles

Not all roles linked to UKRI awards are currently published. In May 2023, UKRI introduced new role titles as part of the launch of the Funding Service. However, the Funding Service roles cannot yet be published directly to GtR, so they have been mapped to the previous Siebel role names for consistency:

  • Project Lead (the Funding Service) is currently Principal Investigator
  • Project Co-Lead (the Funding Service) is currently Co-Investigator
  • Fellow (the Funding Service) is currently Fellow
  • Research and Innovation Associate (the Funding Service) is currently Researcher
  • Researcher Co-lead (the Funding Service) is currently Researcher Co-Investigator

For awards processed through Innovate UK Funding Service only the project manager role is currently published.

Additionally, there are research related roles that are collected but not currently published in GtR including from the Funding Service:

  • project co-lead (international)
  • grant manager
  • visiting researcher
  • specialist
  • technician
  • doctoral student
  • professional enabling staff

From October 2025 student supervisor details have been removed from all studentship records. As part of the studentship data project a comprehensive review of the data fields was undertaken. Supervisor information is not necessary for us to disburse studentship funding effectively, and as a result this data will no longer be collected, displayed or updated in the new studentship portal, and historic supervisor information will not be amended or retained.

Role visibility depends on the system used to process the application and there are limitations on which roles can be published. As a result, some contributors to UKRI funded projects may not be visible which should be considered when analysing role data.

Person organisation

A person’s listed organisation is based on their most recent award. If they’ve moved institutions or left academia this is not reflected.

Publications

Publications imported from third party resource, for example DataCite and ORCID, are published every quarter with no checks; manually entered ones undergo annual review.

The Funding Service project reference

From October 2025 all awards issued via the Funding Service will include a UKRI prefix in their award identifier. For example:

Previous format: Award ID 127

New format: UKRI127

This change ensures consistency across UKRI.

Training grants

Training grants may be offered to one organisation or to a consortia of research organisations. GtR will show the lead organisation only.

Transferred projects

From 2013 onwards Siebel uses a reference system to track project transfers. The original project gets a reference ending in /1 and each transfer adds a new suffix, for example /2, /3 and so on.  The original project /1 shows the full commitment amount when the project was approved.

The transferred project shows only the remaining unspent funding at the time of transfer.

The ‘Related projects’ tab helps clarify this by showing both the original commitment value and the transferred value.

Caution should be used when reporting funded amounts for projects where a transfer has been made, as the funded amount will contain some duplication.

Usage guidelines

The GtR website is open and free for all to use and has been developed using open source, open standards and an Open Government Licence to enable the code to be reused by third parties.

Accessing the data via the API

We’ve provided two application programming interfaces (APIs) as a way of accessing the information directly from other information systems. Find out more about the GtR APIs. This allows third parties to link the GtR data to other datasets and analyse the information for their own purposes.

Frequently asked questions

Why are there duplicate organisation names?

GtR pulls data from multiple UKRI systems which use different identifiers or names for the same organisation. We’re working on improving this, but for now some duplication may occur.

Can I get more information about a research project listed on GtR?

The GtR website has been developed by UKRI to enable users to search for and analyse information about research and innovation funded by UKRI only. If you wish to know more about any research activity published on our website, contact the researchers in charge of the research directly.

Can I update any information listed on my award in GtR?

GtR is unable to change any details published. Please follow UKRI’s process for updating project information.

Note that updates may take time to appear due to quarterly data refreshes.

Can I update or change studentship details in GtR?

GtR cannot change studentship data. This information comes from your university via the studentship data portal. Contact your university’s admin team or the support helpdesk:  support@funding-service.ukri.org

Why isn’t my award visible on GtR?

If your award is missing:

  • it may not have been included in the last data snapshot
  • it may be affected by a publication rule
  • it may be scheduled for the next data release

Please contact us if you believe that these exclusions do not apply to your award, and it should be published.

I have issues with the API

The API is currently unsupported. Here are some possible workarounds to resolve issues when making requests to the API.

Some of the API endpoints which return lists of items, and they return the lists in pages. The size of each page can be included in the request, although the APIs restrict the size to between 10 and 100 items on a page.

Avoiding cached errors after a failure

First thing to be aware of is that there is a cache between the internet and the app, and if a transient error occurs when running a request, that error could be cached to up to 10 minutes. As with all web caching proxies the cache is keyed on the request URL, and so it is possible to use the standard cache busting techniques to work around this issue.

To make the caching proxy request the data again instead of returning cached results you can add a dummy query string parameter to the request and set the parameter to a random string. Changing the value for each request will make the URL different from the original request and the cache will then consider it a new request.

Retrying failed requests

When using the cached busting techniques, it is now possible to catch exceptions on failed requests and try them again with a different random string.

Build a delay into making the requests

In order to avoid overloading the GtR app you should build into the process a delay between making multiple requests and to page through the results in sequence instead of attempting to request them in parallel.

Contacts

For data questions

Email: data@ukri.org

For website questions

Email: gateway@ukri.org

Annex A: data dictionary

This is a list of definitions of terms associated with the ‘outcomes’ tab of GtR projects.

Artistic and creative product

  • Description: description of the artistic and creative product
  • Type of art: type of artistic and creative product
  • Year produced: year when the outcome was produced
  • Impact: the impact of the artistic and creative product
  • URL: website address

Collaboration

  • Description: description of collaboration
  • Parent organisation or organisation: name of collaborating organisation
  • Department: name of collaborating department, faculty, school or ministry
  • Country: country of collaborating organisation
  • Sector: business or societal sector of collaborating organisation
  • Principal investigator contribution: contribution of principal investigator to collaboration
  • Collaborator contribution: contribution of the collaborating organisation to project
  • Impact: impact of the collaboration
  • Start year: year collaboration started

Contact

  • First name: first name of an individual person who has one or more roles on the project
  • Second name: second name of an individual person who has one or more roles on the project
  • Surname: surname of an individual person who has one or more roles on the project
  • ORCID iD: a persistent identifier that distinguishes a person from every other researcher

Engagement activities

  • Body involved with dissemination: organisation assisting with the engagement activity
  • Description: summary description of the engagement activity
  • Form of engagement activity: form of engagement activity
  • Geographic reach: geographic reach
  • Name of official scheme: name of official engagement activity scheme
  • Part of official scheme: whether engagement activity is part of an official scheme
  • Primary audience: type of audience for engagement activity
  • Results and impact: further details and impact of the engagement activity
  • Type of presentation: type of presentation
  • URL: website address
  • Year(s) of engagement activity: year(s) of engagement activity

Further funding

  • Amount: amount of funding in cash (may be in local currency)
  • Country: country of organisation providing further funding
  • Department: department, faculty, school or ministry of funding organisation
  • Description: description of the further funding activity
  • End: end date (month and year)
  • Organisation: name of funding organisation (text)
  • Funding ID: identifier used by organisation providing further funding
  • Sector: societal or business sector
  • Start: start date of further funding
  • Title: title of further funding

Impact summary

  • Description: lay summary of individual impacts arising from the research (including advances in understanding, methods, theory and application and contributions made to society and the economy)
  • First year of impact: date in which the impact first materialised
  • Impact type: actual and potential ways in which this research could be and is being used
  • Sector: business or societal sector receiving the impact

Intellectual property

  • Impact: impact of the intellectual property (IP) created
  • Description: description of the IP created
  • Protection: stage of disclosure
  • IP reference: reference of the IP created
  • IP title: title of the intellectual property
  • Licenced (yes or no)
  • URL: website address
  • Year protection granted: year protection granted

Key findings

  • Description: summary of key findings with the lay audience in mind
  • Exploitation route: actual and potential ways in which the research may be put to use
  • Sectors: business or societal sector of application of research
  • URL: website address

Organisation

  • Organisation city: the city element of the organisation address
  • Organisation country: the country element of the organisation address
  • Organisation department: department of the lead research organisation holding the project
  • Organisation name: name of organisations involved in the project

Policy influence

  • Description or influence: description of the policy influence
  • Geographic reach: reach of the policy influence
  • Impact: impact of the policy influence
  • Policy guideline title: title of policy document or health guideline influenced
  • Policy influence type: the type of influence
  • URL: website address

Product interventions and clinical trials

  • Clinical trial indicator: clinical trial indicator
  • Current stage of development: current stage of development of the product
  • Description: description of the product or intervention
  • Development status: development status
  • Impact: impact of the product or intervention
  • Title of product or intervention: name of product or intervention
  • Intervention type: type of product or intervention
  • UK Clinical Research Network (UKCRN) or International Standard Randomised Controlled Trial Number (ISCTN) ID: identifier of clinical trial (UKCRN or ISCTNID)
  • URL: website address
  • Year development stage completed: year development of product or intervention completed

Project

  • Actual spend: spend over lifetime of project
  • End date: date when project has ended or will end
  • Expected impact: anticipated impact of the project provided by the principal investigator in the proposal
  • Funded amount: the sum of the authorised funding streams
  • Funder: the name of the main funder with responsibility for the project
  • Grant category: categories used by the research councils (currently: research grant, fellowship, training grant, studentship, third party grant and intramural)
  • Grant reference: the identifier of the grant (unique for each funder)
  • Lead research organisation: the name of the organisation that is leading the research and is the grant holder
  • Planned impact: potential economic and societal impacts and pathways towards realising them (specifically it considers who might benefit from the research and how)
  • Project abstract: summary of the project
  • Project location: location of the lead research organisation
  • Project status: statuses are rolled up into ‘Active’ and ‘Closed’
  • Project title: title of the project
  • ProjectID: a unique ID allocated by the GtR project
  • Start date: official start date of project (some awards published have start dates in the future, they reflect UKRI’s commitment to financially support an application that may still be subject to some administrative changes)
  • Technical summary: technical summary of grant included in the proposal
  • Project cost: total cost of project including grant values and project
  • Grant offer: total grant issued to each project participant project role
  • Person role on project: the role that a person is fulfilling on a project (for example, Brian Smith is the principal investigator)

Funder organisations include:

Publication

  • Author: the name of the first author of the publication
  • Book title: title of book
  • Chapter: title of chapter
  • Conference location: location of conference
  • Conference number: number of conference in a series
  • Date published: the date of publication
  • DOl: digital object identifier of publication
  • Edition: book or report edition
  • ISBN: ISBN of the publication
  • ISSN: ISSN of the journal
  • Issue number: issue number of publication
  • Journal title: title of journal
  • PMID: the PubMed unique ID
  • Publication abstract: publication abstract
  • Publication type: publication type identified by ROS or RF
  • Series title: title of series
  • Subtitle: subtitle of publication
  • Title of volume: volume title
  • URL: link to further information on the publication
  • Research databases and models
  • Title: title of the research and database models
  • Type of material: type of research and database models
  • Description: the description of the research and database models
  • Provided to others: who this has been made available to
  • Year produced: year in which the research and database models were produced
  • URL: website address
  • Impact: the impact of the research and database models

Software and technical products

  • Title of technology: title of the software or technical product
  • Type of technology: type of software or technical product
  • Description: the description of the software or technical product
  • Open Source licence? (Y/N): is the software available under any form of licence?
  • Year produced: year in which the software or technical product was produced
  • URL: website address
  • Impact: impact of the software or technical product

Spin-out

  • Company name: the name of the company that was created as a result of project, or whose business strategy was directly influenced by the research project
  • Description: a description of the spin-out company and how it was formed
  • Impact: the impact of the spin-out company
  • URL: website address
  • Year established: year company was established

Page viewed: 11:21 pm on 3 April 2026

Contents

This is the website for UKRI: our seven research councils, Research England and Innovate UK. Let us know if you have feedback or would like to help improve our online products and services.