When Should You Search Grant Databases for Ongoing or Unpublished Research?

Can funding records reveal research that publication databases miss?

Journal databases tell you a great deal about research that has reached the publication stage. They tell you much less about projects that have been funded but are still underway, have recently finished, or never produced an easily identifiable journal article.

Grant and funded-project databases can sometimes fill part of that gap. A funding record may identify a project before its findings appear in the scholarly literature and can provide investigator names, institutional affiliations, project descriptions, funding periods, and other clues for tracing subsequent outputs.

The important question is when that additional search is likely to improve your evidence base rather than simply produce a long list of interesting projects that cannot answer your research question.

Search grant databases when funded projects themselves are useful leads

What grant databases can and cannot tell you

Grant databases sit earlier in the research lifecycle

A bibliographic search usually encounters research after an output has been published and indexed. A grant database can expose a project considerably earlier. That difference is precisely what makes funding records useful when you are trying to identify research beyond the published literature.

For example, NIH RePORTER provides searchable information about NIH-supported research projects and allows searching by criteria such as investigator, organization, project terms, fiscal year, and funding information. The European Commission identifies CORDIS as its primary portal for information about EU-funded research projects and their results.

When is searching grant databases most useful?

The value rises when your review needs to identify research that may not yet be visible in journals. This can occur in rapidly developing fields, where projects are underway while the published evidence remains sparse, or when recently completed studies may still be moving through analysis and publication.

Grant databases may also be useful when you have reason to suspect that relevant research has been conducted but cannot find its outputs. Funding records can provide investigator names, organizations, project titles, abstracts, project numbers, dates, and related information that become new search leads.

For systematic reviews, the broader principle is well established: searches should be sufficiently extensive to reduce the risk that the available literature provides a biased representation of the underlying studies. Cochrane specifically emphasizes the importance of identifying ongoing and unpublished studies when they are relevant to the review.

A funded project is not necessarily a study

This distinction is easy to miss. A grant can support one study, several studies, infrastructure, methodological development, training, data collection, or an entire research programme. The project description may also reflect what investigators proposed rather than exactly what they ultimately conducted.

This is particularly important in evidence synthesis because your unit of interest is normally the study, not the grant. One funded project can generate multiple studies and publications, while a single study can also receive support from more than one funding source.

Grant records can help you find publications indirectly

A project that initially looks unpublished may turn out to have several publications. Grant numbers are sometimes acknowledged in journal articles, and project databases may themselves link to outputs. Investigator names, institutions, project acronyms, distinctive intervention terms, and project titles can also be searched separately.

Rather than asking only, “Is there a paper attached to this grant?”, treat the record as a set of identifiers. Search those identifiers across bibliographic databases, scholarly search engines, institutional repositories, researcher profiles, project websites, and other appropriate sources.

Grant databases are especially useful for ongoing research

An active award can alert you to research that may become relevant after your review is completed. Cochrane notes that awareness of ongoing studies and their expected completion can influence decisions about when a review should be completed or updated.

This makes grant databases potentially useful for horizon scanning as well as retrospective searching. In an emerging research area, knowing that several substantial projects are underway may alter how confidently you describe the apparent absence of evidence.

They can also expose apparently completed projects with no obvious outputs

A project whose funding period has ended but for which no relevant publication can be found deserves closer investigation. It may have produced outputs that are difficult to locate, results may still be in preparation, the proposed work may have changed, or the project may have ended without the anticipated study being completed.

None of these possibilities can be determined from silence alone. The grant record gives you a lead, not the missing result.

Different funders provide different levels of information

There is no universal grant database covering all research funding. National agencies, charities, foundations, international programmes, and specialist funders maintain different systems, and public information varies substantially.

NIH RePORTER, for example, contains extensive searchable records of NIH-supported projects, while CORDIS covers projects funded through European Union research programmes. For other topics, the relevant source may be a national research council, disease-specific charity, government department, foundation, or institutional database.

Your search therefore needs to follow the funding ecology of the field. Searching a famous grant database that rarely funds the kind of research you are studying adds little merely because the database is large.

Grant databases are not substitutes for study registries

If you are specifically searching for registered clinical trials, a clinical trial registry is usually the more direct source. Grant databases answer a different question: what research has been funded?

A funded clinical project may lead you to a trial registration, and a trial registration may lead you back to a sponsor or grant. Using the two sources together can therefore be valuable, but they should not be treated as interchangeable.

How a grant record can lead to research missing from your database search

Common mistakes when searching funded research

Use grant searching selectively and trace projects forward

The central decision is whether knowing about research before publication would materially improve your review. If the answer is yes, grant databases can be worth the additional search effort. If your task is a limited narrative overview of an established field, exhaustive funding searches may add considerable work without changing the purpose of the review.

Grant searching is therefore best understood as investigative retrieval. You are following the research process upstream, before publication, and then tracing promising projects forward to determine what evidence eventually emerged. The amount of effort this deserves should remain proportionate to how important unpublished research is to your particular question.

Before treating a funding record as evidence of an unpublished study

Questions about using grant databases to find research

Grant records are leads into research that may not yet be published

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