Visual Funding Portfolios

of RCUK Funded Research Organisations

The distribution of science funding greatly affects the future of research. Visual funding portfolios allow us to understand and coordinate science funding in better ways.

Based on the RCUK funding data provided by Gateway2Research, we created visual funding portfolios for the research organisations in the UK that are funded by the research councils. These visual portfolios are currently using the NIH’s RCDC system which has around 200 biomedical categories in different levels. (Ideally we wanted to use the RCUK research classification but they are not yet included in the RCUK data. We are going to update this as soon as the assigned RCUK categories are available via Gateway2Research.)

We automatically assigned RCDC categories to grants from RCUK active in 2012 and calculated an overview map that shows the overall distribution of funds for the 50 most used categories.

In this map, the bubble size shows the grant amounts spent on the topics, while the placement and coloring indicates similarities in the distribution of funding organizations for that topic.

Comparing Funding Portfolios

Applying this topic topology to the portfolios of research institutions
reveals their unique preferences, priorities, and gaps: