DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.15516588
title: Harmonised datasets of research project grants from UK and European funders

description: 2025.05.26 Update

Updated the Research Projects csv with renamed columns from 'title' and 'abstract' to 'grant_title' and 'grant_abstact'.

The data download from EPMC already contained a 'title' column, refering to the awardee title (e.g., Professor) so after the final column harmonisation step some EPMC entries in the original file had the wrong information (i.e., "Professor", "Dr", etc) instead of project titles.

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This Zenodo entry provides integrated and harmonised datasets of research grants and associated awardees from multiple funding databases, specifically designed to facilitate research funding analyses. The dataset is one of the most comprehensive openly accessible compilations of research project funding information, containing over 320,000 harmonised entries from major UK and European funding databases. While predominantly UK-focused, the dataset also includes significant international coverage from European Commission programmes and international funders captured in Europe PMC.

This dataset will be updated several times per year to include new data and refinements

The datasets consolidate grant information from four key sources: Europe PMC (EPMC), UKRI Gateway to Research, NIHR Funding and Awards, and the European Commission's Horizon 2020 and Horizon Europe programmes. My sincere thanks go to all those involved in creating and maintaining this essential open data infrastructure.

Two datasets are included:





Research projects.csv: This dataset includes harmonised grant details such as grant IDs, titles, abstracts, funding organisations, lead institutions (including available identifiers), country of origin, project start/end dates, and funding amounts (in original currencies).




Research projects awardees.csv: This dataset contains information about researchers and their institutional affiliations associated with each project. It includes researcher names, identifiers (ORCID, person IDs), affiliated organisations, their roles within projects, and associated grant IDs.



Research projects data coverage (Total: >320,000 entries):





UKRI Gateway to Research: >160,000 entries




Europe PMC: >90,000 entries




European Commission: >50,000 entries




NIHR Funding and Awards: >10,000 entries



Data harmonisation involved standardisation of formats, handling missing values, deduplication (prioritising completeness of records), and consistent assignment of country information using various methods appropriate to each data source.

Limitations include:





Single-institution representation for multi-institutional EPMC grants.




Country assignments based on inferred information where direct data was limited.




Original currencies are retained without conversions.




Inconsistent availability of organisational and researcher identifiers across data sources.


Focus on project grant information - coverage of infrastructure investment from major UK funders is limited at the moment.


This entry also contains the processing code developed for reproducibility and transparency purposes, hosted in a Google Colab notebook. Detailed methodology, known limitations, and usage instructions are documented to support reproducibility and transparency in data processing.

Future work:





Expanding to include additional national and international funding bodies.




Collaborating with charity partners to incorporate charity-specific funding data.




Linking datasets to other open-access resources, such as the Research Organization Registry (ROR), and liaising with other organisations doing similar work, to avoid duplication of efforts.




Performing "live analyses" on datasets as they are updated, including advanced methods such as topic modelling.



 

Citation guidance:

If you use this dataset in your work, please cite it as follows:

Gómez Magenti, J. (2025). Harmonised datasets of research project grants from UK and European funders [Data set]. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15479412