🔬 UKRI Gateway to Research Scraper

🚀 Export UK Research and Innovation grants in seconds. Filter projects, funders, abstracts, and budgets with a single keyword query. No API key, no registration, no manual CSV wrangling.

🕒 Last updated: 2026-05-12 · 📊 17 fields per record · 🇬🇧 UKRI + 7 research councils · 💷 GBP grant values · ♻️ Live per run

The UKRI Gateway to Research Scraper queries the UK Research and Innovation public Gateway to Research API and returns 17 fields per record, covering grant reference, title, abstract, technical summary, funder, budget in pounds, start and end dates, identifier mappings, and publication counts. UKRI consolidates funding from the seven UK research councils, Innovate UK, and Research England under one taxonomy.

The catalog spans every funded project across EPSRC, BBSRC, AHRC, ESRC, MRC, NERC, STFC, plus Innovate UK and Research England. Both basic research grants and applied innovation awards appear in the same feed. This Actor returns the API payload as clean JSON, with pagination handled and millisecond timestamps converted to ISO 8601 for downstream use.

🎯 Target Audience	💡 Primary Use Cases
Research office managers, UK research strategists, technology transfer offices, science journalists, policy analysts, scientometrics teams, partnership scouts	Grant landscape research, partner discovery, funder benchmarking, sector spend analysis, science of science studies, science journalism

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📋 What the UKRI Gateway to Research Scraper does

A flexible query workflow in a single run:

• 🔍 Free-text search. Match any term across project titles, abstracts, and organisations, like quantum, climate, or gene therapy.
• 🏛️ Funder breakdown. Each project tagged with the awarding body (EPSRC, BBSRC, ESRC, etc.).
• 💷 GBP budgets. Total project value in pounds, where disclosed.
• 📅 Date range. ISO 8601 start and end dates per grant.
• 🏷️ Identifier mapping. RCUK and external identifiers as parallel arrays.

Each record includes the project ID, grant reference, public URL, title, status, grant category, abstract text, potential impact text, technical summary, funder name and ID, value in pounds, start and end dates, identifier types and values, publication count, output flag, and scrape timestamp.

💡 Why it matters: the UK spends over £8 billion per year through UKRI. Gateway to Research is the canonical public record of who got funded, for what, and on what timeline. Building your own pipeline means handling the legacy JSON shape, pagination, and identifier normalisation. This Actor returns a flat, query-ready table on every run.

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🎬 Full Demo

🚧 Coming soon: a 3-minute walkthrough showing how to go from sign-up to a downloaded dataset.

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⚙️ Input

Input	Type	Default	Behavior
query	string	"quantum"	Free-text search across project titles, abstracts, and organisations.
maxItems	integer	10	Records to return. Free plan caps at 10, paid plan at 1,000,000.

Example: 100 quantum-related grants.

{
    "maxItems": 100,
    "query": "quantum"
}

Example: deep dive on climate research.

{
    "maxItems": 1000,
    "query": "climate change"
}

⚠️ Good to Know: Gateway to Research paginates 25 records at a time. Some legacy projects have placeholder abstracts ("Abstracts are not currently available...") because the abstract was not required at submission time or contained personal information. Numeric fields are present only when the funder published them.

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📊 Output

Each grant record contains 17 fields. Download the dataset as CSV, Excel, JSON, or XML.

🧾 Schema

Field	Type	Example
🆔 id	string	"00082994-6774-4061-A06F-00EC3C928876"
🔗 url	string	"https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=EP%2FY004663%2F2"
🏷️ grantReference	string | null	"EP/Y004663/2"
📰 title	string	"Quantum Algorithms for Nonlinear Differential Equations"
📊 status	string | null	"Closed"
🗂️ grantCategory	string | null	"Research Grant"
📝 abstractText	string | null	"This project investigates..."
🎯 potentialImpactText	string | null	"Outputs will support..."
📋 technicalSummary	string | null	"We develop new algorithms..."
🏛️ funderName	string | null	"EPSRC"
🆔 funderId	string | null	"798CB33D-C79E-4578-83F2-72606407192C"
💷 valuePounds	number | null	19022
📅 startDate	ISO 8601 | null	"2024-02-01T00:00:00.000Z"
📅 endDate	ISO 8601 | null	"2025-03-30T23:00:00.000Z"
🏷️ identifierTypes	string[]	["RCUK"]
🏷️ identifierValues	string[]	["EP/Y004663/2"]
📚 publicationsCount	number	0
📄 hasOutput	boolean | null	false
🕒 scrapedAt	ISO 8601	"2026-05-12T16:29:55.216Z"

📦 Sample records

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✨ Why choose this Actor

	Capability
🇬🇧	Official UKRI feed. Pulls directly from the Gateway to Research public API, the canonical record of UKRI funding.
🏛️	Multi-council coverage. EPSRC, BBSRC, AHRC, ESRC, MRC, NERC, STFC, Innovate UK, and Research England in one query.
💷	GBP budgets. Grant value in pounds for sector-level spend analysis.
📅	ISO 8601 dates. Start and end timestamps normalised from epoch milliseconds.
⚡	Fast. 25 grants per page, 10,000 records in around fifteen minutes.
🔁	Always fresh. Every run pulls the live feed so new grants appear within days of award.
🚫	No authentication. Works with open UK research data. No login or API key needed.

📊 UKRI distributes more than £8 billion per year across the UK research base. Gateway to Research is the public ledger.

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📈 How it compares to alternatives

Approach	Cost	Coverage	Refresh	Filters	Setup
⭐ UKRI Gateway to Research Scraper (this Actor)	$5 free credit, then pay-per-use	All UKRI councils + Innovate UK	Live per run	free-text	⚡ 2 min
Official Gateway to Research UI	Free	Same data, manual	Live	UI filters	🐢 Manual export per query
Bulk dumps from research councils	Free	Per-council snapshot	Quarterly	None	🕒 Manual ETL per council
Paid research-intelligence platforms	$1,000+/month	Multi-funder aggregated	Daily	Many	⏳ Vendor onboarding

Pick this Actor when you want the live UKRI catalog in clean JSON, with server-side query support and zero ETL.

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🚀 How to use

1. 📝 Sign up. Create a free account with $5 credit (takes 2 minutes).
2. 🌐 Open the Actor. Go to the UKRI Gateway to Research Scraper page on the Apify Store.
3. 🎯 Set input. Type a keyword (or leave default) and set maxItems.
4. 🚀 Run it. Click Start and let the Actor collect your data.
5. 📥 Download. Grab your results in the Dataset tab as CSV, Excel, JSON, or XML.

⏱️ Total time from signup to downloaded dataset: 3-5 minutes. No coding required.

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💼 Business use cases

🏛️ Research Offices & Grant Strategy Benchmark grants against your institution's portfolio Map which councils fund your themes most heavily Identify successful PIs and labs in your sector Track funder priorities across the seven councils	🔗 Technology Transfer & Partnerships Find Innovate UK grant recipients in your industry Identify SME spinouts with prior public funding Map academic-industry collaborations through grants Spot emerging research themes ahead of commercial deals
📊 Policy & Funding Analysts Sector spend by research council and grant category Long-run trends in UK public R&D priorities Compare funding flows to universities versus institutes Quantify support for early-career versus established PIs	📰 Science Journalism & Comms Story leads from large or unusual grants Profile labs and their funding histories Investigate recurring grant recipients Cross-reference funded projects with their publications

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🌟 Beyond business use cases

Data like this powers more than commercial workflows. The same structured records support research, education, civic projects, and personal initiatives.

🎓 Research and academia Empirical datasets for papers, thesis work, and coursework Longitudinal studies tracking changes across snapshots Reproducible research with cited, versioned data pulls Classroom exercises on data analysis and ethical scraping	🎨 Personal and creative Side projects, portfolio demos, and indie app launches Data visualizations, dashboards, and infographics Content research for bloggers, YouTubers, and podcasters Hobbyist collections and personal trackers
🤝 Non-profit and civic Transparency reporting and accountability projects Advocacy campaigns backed by public-interest data Community-run databases for local issues Investigative journalism on public records	🧪 Experimentation Prototype AI and machine-learning pipelines with real data Validate product-market hypotheses before engineering spend Train small domain-specific models on niche corpora Test dashboard concepts with live input

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🔌 Automating UKRI Gateway to Research Scraper

Control the scraper programmatically for scheduled runs and pipeline integrations:

• 🟢 Node.js. Install the apify-client NPM package.
• 🐍 Python. Use the apify-client PyPI package.
• 📚 See the Apify API documentation for full details.

The Apify Schedules feature lets you trigger this Actor on any cron interval. Hourly, daily, or weekly refreshes keep downstream databases in sync automatically.

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❓ Frequently Asked Questions

🧩 How does it work?

Type a free-text query, click Start, and the Actor calls the Gateway to Research public API, normalises epoch timestamps to ISO 8601, and emits 17 columns of clean JSON. No browser automation, no captchas, no setup.

📏 How accurate is the data?

Records come straight from the UKRI Gateway to Research database. Free-text fields like abstract and technical summary follow the original proposal language. Some legacy grants have placeholder abstracts because the abstract was not required at submission time.

🔁 How often is the dataset refreshed?

Gateway to Research updates regularly as new grants are awarded and existing grants publish outputs. Every run of this Actor fetches the live feed, so your dataset reflects the catalog at run time.

🏛️ Which funders are covered?

All seven UK research councils (EPSRC, BBSRC, AHRC, ESRC, MRC, NERC, STFC), plus Innovate UK and Research England. Gateway to Research is the consolidated public record across all UKRI bodies.

⏰ Can I schedule regular runs?

Yes. Use Apify Schedules to run this Actor on any cron interval (hourly, daily, weekly) and keep a downstream database in sync.

⚖️ Is this data legal to use?

UKRI Gateway to Research data is published under the Open Government Licence and is intended for public reuse, including commercial use. Attribution is required for derivative works.

💼 Can I use this data commercially?

Yes. Open Government Licence permits commercial use with attribution. Research-intelligence and grant-strategy products are commonly built on this feed.

💳 Do I need a paid Apify plan to use this Actor?

No. The free Apify plan is enough for testing and small runs (10 records per run). A paid plan lifts the limit and gives you access to scheduling, higher concurrency, and larger datasets.

🔁 What happens if a run fails or gets interrupted?

Apify automatically retries transient errors. If a run still fails, you can inspect the log in the Runs tab, fix the input, and re-run. Partial datasets from failed runs are preserved so you never lose progress.

📚 Can I get publication or outcomes data?

Each record includes publicationsCount and hasOutput summary fields. For full publication lists tied to a grant, reach out via the contact form below to request a companion outputs scraper.

🆘 What if I need help?

Our support team is here to help. Contact us through the Apify platform or use the Tally form linked below.

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🔌 Integrate with any app

UKRI Gateway to Research Scraper connects to any cloud service via Apify integrations:

• Make - Automate multi-step workflows
• Zapier - Connect with 5,000+ apps
• Slack - Get run notifications in your channels
• Airbyte - Pipe research data into your warehouse
• GitHub - Trigger runs from commits and releases
• Google Drive - Export datasets straight to Sheets

You can also use webhooks to trigger downstream actions when a run finishes. Push fresh grant data into your CRM, or alert your research office when new awards land in your themes.

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🔗 Recommended Actors

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• 📜 UK Contracts Finder Scraper - UK public sector procurement notices
• ⚖️ eCFR US Federal Regulations Scraper - US Code of Federal Regulations full text
• 🔬 Figshare Scraper - Open research datasets and publications
• 🧪 ClinicalTrials.gov Scraper - Global registry of clinical studies

💡 Pro Tip: browse the complete ParseForge collection for more reference-data scrapers.

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🆘 Need Help? Open our contact form to request a new scraper, propose a custom data project, or report an issue.

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⚠️ Disclaimer: this Actor is an independent tool and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by UKRI, Gateway to Research, or any UK government body. All trademarks mentioned are the property of their respective owners. Only publicly available open data published under the Open Government Licence is collected.