Award holders of our Springboard, Starter Grants for Clinical Lecturers, Clinician Scientist Fellowship, GCRF Networking Grants, Newton International and Advanced Fellowship schemes are required to report their research outputs annually via Researchfish throughout their award and for five years after.
Introduction
Capturing the outcomes of the research we fund is a crucial part of our research funding activities - it allows us to communicate the benefits of our awardees’ research to supporters and to ensure that our schemes are fit for purpose. In 2013 we started using Researchfish - an online reporting tool that was developed from the MRC e-Val – to collect research outputs. This replaced our end of grant reports on Word documents, which did not lend themselves to analysis.
Researchfish allows researchers to log outputs, outcomes and impact data about their research in a personal portfolio; these data can then be easily attributed to the relevant award(s) that they hold and reported back to funders. Many funding organisations use Researchfish and observe its common format, making it a convenient way for researchers to report outcomes to a host of different funding agencies. Researchfish facilitates funders to capture and analyse the impacts and outputs of their schemes.
If you are an Academy award holder and would like to know more about how to report through Researchfish, please see the information below or visit the Researchfish website.
What you need to do
Your Researchfish portfolio is structured so that you can create entries for distinct output types and sections. You or a nominated delegate can add, edit and delete entries, which can then be quickly and easily attributed to one or more grant award(s) you hold with us or any of the other funding organisations that use Researchfish. Once per year, we will ask you to report the entries relevant to your Academy award to us during our submission window (see below.)
Researchfish has prepared a video demonstrating how to enter, attribute and submit data for a particular grant; it also hosts webinars and provides other support for PIs and delegates. Please visit their website for further information.
Reporting your research outputs via Researchfish data is a condition of your grant. Please be aware that you will also need to submit a Final Expenditure Report within 3 months of the end of your grant. Please visit the webpage for your scheme to download the relevant Final Expenditure Report template.
When to submit
Research outputs relevant to Academy grants should be reported annually during our submission window, which runs from mid-January to the end of March every year. You are mandated to report in each year of your award – including the first submission window following the close of your award – and are asked to continue to report for five years afterwards. This longer term reporting allows us to track the full impact of our awards on our awardees’ research and their careers.
It is possible to enter, amend and update entries in your portfolio at any time throughout the year but these can only be reported to funders during their respective submission window. We will retain the data submitted to us in Researchfish indefinitely.
How we use Researchfish data
Each year, we analyse the reported outputs from all our awards collected via Researchfish; these analyses inform internal discussions around our research funding activities. Some of the results of these analyses are published on our website – see, for example, our report on the Starter Grant for Clinical Lecturers scheme. We may share results from analyses carried out on the data collected via Researchfish at the level of grant scheme, strategic initiative, or field of research with other funding agencies or research organisations, as part of joint evaluation studies.
The Academy complies with the requirements of the Data Protection Act 1998 with regard to the collection, storage, processing and disclosure of personal information and is committed to upholding the Act’s core data protection principles.
Queries
Answers to frequently asked questions can be downloaded from this page. Please contact the Researchfish support team with any questions about the system or, for any other queries, email the grants team on grants@acmedsci.ac.uk.
Researchfish FAQs