A new way to follow the research trail

Good quality research is in high demand, as researchers look for useful collaborators, research managers seek to develop commercial partnerships, and funders try to demonstrate that they have invested well. That should be good for the UK’s universities, whose researchers perform well on the world stage in terms of both the quality and the quantity of their outputs—so it is frustrating that research outputs remain so hard to find.

In fact, searching for research has been so tricky up until now that the UK still can’t put an accurate figure on the numbers of research outputs its universities produce, or even say (with any certainty) who has funded them.

All this means that people are struggling to access all the research that is out there and universities are severely restricted when they need to demonstrate the impact of their research outputs. Researchers, universities and funders all stand to gain if we can find a way to make it easier to track the UK’s research outputs and attribute them accurately to funding streams.