Analysis 2022 – Submission Guidance

Introduction – The context of the 2022 analysis submission documentation
Inclusion/Exclusion Criteria – The main criteria for the analysis
Data Extraction – Some general advice for exporting/extracting award data
Column Headings – A more detailed explanation for the data fields required for the analysis
- This includes advice on how to separate supportive ‘indirect’ awards from the main analysis
Data Submission – The process by which submissions for the analysis are made
Data Dictionary – a tabulated summary of the data fields including whether fields are mandatory and/or publicly available

Introduction

This document provides the guidance to submit award data for the fifth UK Health Research Analysis, which has provided a regular report on the funding landscape for biomedical research since 2004.

To allow for a shared protocol for data collection across many different funding organisations, the essential award data is kept to a minimum. Additional, non-mandatory data can be provided which enhances the final dataset. Further details about the use and analysis of the data is found within the accompanying Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ).

Many thanks,

Dr Jim Carter, Chair of the Health Research Analysis Forum

Inclusion/Exclusion Criteria

The basic criteria

The basic requirements for inclusion remain the same as previous reports:

Research is funded by a participating organisation
Research is of health or biomedical relevance
The awards included in this analysis must be active (i.e. incurring spend) in the 2022 calendar year (01/01/2022 to 31/12/2022).

All award types are eligible for inclusion, including research grants, training awards, intramural support for units, centres or institutes, contracted research assessments and any other funding which goes towards the support of biomedically-relevant research.

Submission

We ask for a range of information on each award submitted, to allow us to classify and assess the data for the analysis. Full details of these data requirements are below. Submission of data is by a standardised excel spreadsheet, sent to the MRC project management team (ideally via secure FTP, including OneDrive).

Awards for analysis versus ‘indirect awards’

This analysis focuses on the directly funded UK research of the participating funders. In practice this is generally any award that directly supports a specific project or programme with a defined set of research goals, often awarded as part of peer-review led process. We would expect all such awards to be fully coded/code-able under HRCS.

However, there are a number of elements of funding that are essential to support research activity. For projects or programme awards the costs to support them may be built into the financing of the awards, as contributions to full economic costings. They may also be made by other types of awards which support the indirect costs of conducting research. These indirect costs can be supported through funders providing additional awards to fund infrastructure, administration, equipment, building maintenance, conferences or even salaries. Such awards are invariably hard, or even impossible, to HRCS code but still provide a vital part of the funding landscape.

We are not interested in breaking direct awards down into financial contributions within an individual award, but we would like to collect information on those other awards that fall outside the traditional project or programme format for funding. As part of the UK Health Research Analysis 2022 report, we will be carrying out a separate assessment on the level of investment in indirect costs. Therefore it is important that ALL awards, whether direct or indirect, are part of the data submission you provide us.

Defining Indirect Awards

Following the successful introduction in 2014, we have developed a submission process to better define what “indirect funding” is and how to assess it. Therefore if you have indirect/infrastructure awards in the dataset you provide us, we would like to be able to classify them more easily.

We have therefore included the IndirectAward column to identify those awards that fall into the areas of Infrastructure, Studentships or Personal health research related funding, or cannot be coded (Incomplete/Missing or Non-health Research).

This is the only column which may need to be filled in manually. Everything else should be relatively simply transferred from a funder’s own records to this excel format.

Further information on this can be found in the IndirectAward data field notes below. If you are still unsure about how to categorise an award, please contact the Project Management Team via the HRCS website.

Advice on data extraction

Each funder will have a different method of award portfolio management and therefore different methods of data export. Therefore we will be asking each funder to provide a short description of their coding approach and participation in the analysis. This format matches both the 2014 and 2018 analyses, as shown in Appendix 1 of their reports. We strongly recommend funders familiarise themselves with their previous method(s) of submission as this may help with funder-specific queries:

Format is the standard “one line per grant” data entry excel spreadsheet.
Please do not apply ‘wrap text’ to any columns in the spreadsheet. This may be helpful to you if you are looking at a small/subset of awards, but in a spreadsheet of thousands, it does not help the analysis.
Please note we are not expecting those submitting the data to spend endless hours filling in all empty fields, especially if the field is not a mandatory requirement. If a required field has data missing on your database, do not worry. We are asking for as complete a submission as possible, but do not intend to create hours of work for those doing so.
Given the data collection is open for several months, starting in the end of the reporting period of 2022 we are happy to accept data that is ready to export as a ‘work in progress’ (WiP) dataset. We can then append any additional awards you wish to add before the final data collection deadline of the 31st of May 2023.

Data Export Column Headings and Descriptions

Please note that while the data fields required may seem lengthy, but it’s important to remember that submission of these details are designed to be the minimum required to ensure we have enough data to perform the analysis. The requirements are largely unchanged from data collected for previous UK Health Research Analyses.

FunderOrganisation, FunderAcronym and OrganisationReference

With the exception of AMRC, all funders submitting data should be from a single organisation. Therefore your funder name and acronym (if your funder has one) should be the same for all award lines.

The OrganisationReference is the unique identifier you use to track the award in question. This is more commonly known as the ‘grant code’, ‘grant ID’ or ‘award#’ depending on your organisation. If there are several variants used by your organisation, please provide the OrganisationReference which matches those submitted to public datasets. This will allow easier matching when cross-referencing our data to external datasets, such as Europe PubMed Central or Dimensions, to allow us to complete the analysis. It also allows for further projects using this data that the grant reference links to, such as publications, patents or clinical trials.

Note that as many funders have similar methods for applying IDs (such as using dates or numerals) we will also give a unique HRCS2022_ID to all awards once the final analysis dataset has been collated. This allows easier handling of combined data and prevents confusion if two independent funders have similar or even matching ‘unique’ OrganisationReferences.

PI Institution Details

To establish where the research is being conducted, we ask for the organisation of the primary award recipient (commonly referred to as the ‘Principal Investigator’ or PI). The PIInstitution, PICity, PIPostCode and PICountry may be used to assess distribution of funds across UK regions, but only PICity and PIInstitution will be in the public dataset.

PIInstitution should also be the overall host organisation. An embedded unit or centre within an Institution would be used as PIAddressLine1. For example, a PI at the MRC Toxicology Unit at the University of Sheffield would have “University of Sheffield” as PIInstitution and “MRC Toxicology Unit” as PIAddressLine1.

We intend to harmonise location data and provide a unique identifier – PIInstitutionID – in the public dataset from the Research Organization Registry (ROR); a global, community-led registry of open persistent identifiers for research organizations, available under a Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain dedication. If you use ROR or another organisation identification system (e.g. GRID, CrossRef), it would be helpful to provide this to allow quicker matching. However, only include in this in your submission if you are permitted by your data supplier.

Funding Mechanism & FundingStream

Establishing the mechanism and stream of funding is helpful for the many sub-analyses conducted using the UK Health Research Analysis report datasets. However this is not necessarily recorded by all funders, and even if there is such a field available, the definitions used may not be the same from one funder to another. As such, neither is a mandatory data field. If they are available in your database, please include them. If not, move on.

StartDate, EndDate, Duration

Both start and end dates should be in standard DD/MM/YYYY format. Exporting of dates can lead to errors, particularly if converted from text so please check your submission before sending. We’d also recommend that if you publish data elsewhere that the dates you use match those already published. Using a different date (actual vs expected vs proposed) could lead to discrepancies in the comparative assessments we perform.

You do not need to calculate the Duration field yourself. This will be calculated for you by the central project team. This allows for a consistent approach based on the start/end date difference. This also helps us identify errors and anomalies; you’d be surprised how often end dates can erroneously appear before start dates!

This also allows us to calculate a 2022 award amount, based on the dates/duration and TotalAward value. Other date formats could be supplied by arrangement, but this is our preference.

TotalAward / AnnualAward

We ask all funders to provide one of two values for their awards:

TotalAward – the total value of the award for its complete duration. This is our preferred value for consistency when analysing award values across different funders. We would generally recommend either of the following values for this:
- The final total expenditure if the award has been completed
- The total commitment (i.e. how much you’re expecting to spend) for awards that are on-going
AnnualAward – the per annum value of the award, if the TotalAward value is not available.
- This would generally be used for longer term investments without a set end or where no overall commitment is available.
- We would ask for the latest full annual expenditure you have, so we can accept the latest financial year (2021/22) rather than calendar year if this is the only option.

Please note this is an either/or option. Please do not supply an award value in both Total and Annual formats.
We then use the values provided to determine the allocated value for the period the award was active in 2022.
Please note we are not asking for actual, budgeted or estimated spend profiles. This will mean the allocated values will not reconcile to other financial / budgeting reports from participating organisations.
Currency is assumed to be pounds sterling (£GBP).

To calculate the award value specifically for 2022 from the TotalAward value, we use an annualised commitment calculation; this means dividing the total value of the award by the number of days/months it is/was active, then multiply by the number of days/months it is/was active in 2022. This gives a predicted amount of spend. Further details on why we use this method can be found in the accompanying FAQ document. Submissions of AnnualAward values will use this value as provided (no calculations based on start/end dates).

AwardTitle, AwardAbstract, and AwardLayAbstract

Award Title and Abstract are vitally important if you submit your awards without previous HRCS coding. Without them we will not be able to incorporate your awards into the main analysis. However the subsequent publication of these fields fulfills another key aim of the analysis; to allow subsequent sub-analysis of the dataset, e.g. by keyword search or text mining.

However if these fields contain sensitive information, such as personal information, details of in vivo experiments, patent details or copyrighted materials please ensure the data is anonymised/redacted prior to submission.

Please note that AwardAbstract refers to scientific or technical abstracts; a description that gives a detailed overview of the work being conducted. There is also the option for AwardLayAbstracts to be submitted to the analysis, as they provide a more user-friendly description of the research.

IndirectAward

As explained earlier, the UK Health Research Analysis series has a primary focus on direct research funding, principally grants with a specific research aim. However a significant proportion of health research funding goes towards indirect costs, such as the buildings, administration and personal awards.

To segregate between direct and indirect awards, we are asking funders to fill in the IndirectAward field for any awards that fit one of the four criteria listed below. Where possible, please use the Comment field (see below) to add further details. Please use these specific terms in bold (and only these terms) for the following options:

<Leave Blank>
- For all other (mostly direct) awards that have been coded as normal.
Infrastructure
- “Infrastructure” awards can be described as those funding a building, site or group to support administration, construction or maintenance.
- Examples of “Infrastructure” awards include:
  - Buildings & equipment (construction, maintenance)
  - ‘Core’ funding (e.g. for MRC units) & other administrative costs
  - co-ordinated ventures like CRNs, Methodology Hubs etc..
  - Awards to support hosting/organising conferences
Studentships
- Several main funders support studentships via block grants to universities, sometimes referred to as Doctoral Training Partnerships or DTPs.
- These awards usually do not have sufficient granularity to code under HRCS, so to accommodate this method of funding into the analysis, we provide this tag as an option under the IndirectAward criteria.
- Please note that individual studentship data can also be submitted, although to balance the analysis we would seek to link studentships back to the DTP that funded them to avoid double counting of expenditure.
Personal
- “Personal” awards are those that are given to an individual for a specific purpose outside of a research project/programme, such as extra training, salary support or conference attendance.
- Examples of “Personal” awards include:
  - Travel grants and other awards for conference attendance
  - Bursaries and other awards to support researchers directly
  - Professional membership fees
  - Funding for clinician training, lab visits and secondments
Incomplete/Missing
- There is not enough information to be able to judge what the award is for. E.g. if title/abstract is missing and/or unclear.
Non-health research
- The award is definitively not health research related.
- In most cases, we would not expect to see these awards at all and would be excluded from the analysis.
- However there may be circumstances where you would like the project team to help determine if an award should be included in your data submission.
- By adding this marker, and an accompanying “Comment” we will endeavour to assist you with these particularly tricky awards… but please note our central resources are extremely limited.

Comments

Any other comments or caveats relating to a particular grant should be added to the “Comments” column. This includes any explanatory details relating to the IndirectAward options above, additional information on co-funding or any issues with unusual funding mechanisms.

Coding (RA_1 to HC_5%)

Any award with HRCS coding already provided should be submitted as individual columns with accompanying percentages.

Note that for funders new to the analysis, we will ensure your award data is coded for you.

Data Submission

Submitting award data to the HRAF (coordinated by the MRC) may require a data transfer agreement (DTA) or similar so please ensure that this has been considered and has been signed off by your organisation before sending your data to us. Our Data Publicity Statement provides you with the details of what will happen to data submitted to us.

Data should be provided to us via our pro forma spreadsheet. Once your standardised spreadsheet has been populated, you will need to contact the Project Management Team to arrange for a suitable method for submission. Our preference is via a secure upload to a OneDrive folder only your organisation will have access to. You are welcome to use your own FTP arrangements if you wish.

Once submitted, the team also will conduct some basic validation of the data which may require some additional checking and small tweaks to the dataset.

If you have provided a partial submission, you will have until the end of the data collection period to provide any further awards to the analysis. Late submissions may not be accepted if they will delay the final report production.

If you have any other problems or queries

We welcome any specific problems or queries you have regarding the data submission and coding process. The more feedback we receive, the better the guidance we can provide, making the report more consistent in how the coding is applied and analysed. Any specific examples will be added to Annex 1 (see below). You can always contact us via the HRCS website.

Thank you for your time.