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Getting Started - how to get the most out of RDFunding
1. Home page explained
2. Search for Funding Opportunities
The whole point of searching a database is to prevent you wading through pages of inappropriate information.
To search the database and pull out a collection of relevant grants, choose Search for Funding Opportunities from the menu on the home page or Criteria Search on the yellow navigation menu. The screen below will then appear:
The database can be searched on any of the six criteria:
RDFunding allows you to select a term from one or more criteria. If you select two criteria the database will look for grants that match both criteria. It is therefore recommended that as a searching strategy you search on one term first, and then add others terms to refine the search, if you get too many matches. There is the facility to chose how to display the information. Try the different options to see which you want. You can also select the order of the results (alphabetical by funding organisation or by closing date). You can also choose to see all grants selected from your search or just those whose closing dates are in the next 3 or 6 months.
You can click on either the funding source name or the grant name to select more information, from the search results.
Some Advice on Searching
- You are advised to start with just one search term and see what you get from that. If you get too many results, then re-run the search with an extra term to narrow it down. Continue this process until you get down to a manageable number of awards.
- You cannot search for multiple terms in the same field. For example, you cannot search for awards that apply both to Community Care and Primary Care. To do this you must run two separate searches.
- For Amount and Duration search for 'unspecified' as well as the search term you are looking for. For example, a number of funding sources don't specify how much the award will be for or how long it will last. You will need to do a search for all awards where the amount is unspecified, as well as a search for those awards that specify the amount you are looking for.
- For funding that is disease specific, use the Freetext search facility, on the right hand side of the search page. For example if you type 'Brain Injury' in the box and run the Freetext search button, the results will show all the funding sources and awards that contain the phrase 'Brain Injury'. It will not produce results where 'Brain' and 'Injury' are listed separately.
- To disseminate information about research funding within your organisation, the newsletter format is probably of most use and we ask you to please acknowledge us as the source of the information and direct people to our website.
- If you need any help or assistance with searching RDFunding, please contact us by Email at or by telephone on 0113 392 6379.
3. Funding by Closing Date
This section allows you to look at all awards which have a closing date in any given month. There are different formats to enable you to print this information, as well as summaries and the option to see 'Confirmed' dates only.
Note: Not all funding bodies specify closing dates, and others have multiple closing dates of which only the first one is included in the closing date listings. More details can be found in the comments section of the relevant grant. There are two other groups of funding sources which either do not have fixed closing dates Apply anytime, or the next closing date is not known Unspecified.
4. New Entries
This section lets you see all the grants which have been added or amended during the last 7 days. It is a good place to keep track of the latest calls for proposals, and is available in a newsletter format for those of you who disseminate the information round your organisation.
Again please acknowledge us as the source of the information and direct people to our website.
5. Profiling Service
The other method of ensuring you are kept up-to-date on the latest calls is to register with us. We will send you a weekly email including links to the grant which match your registered areas of interest. You can specify as many or as few areas as you like, or you can choose 'any' to be alerted about all funding opportunities, irrespective of the relevance.
6. Special Editions
We have produced a range of Special Editions, pulling together information relating to types of research awards available. The list of titles also include grants for new researchers, travel awards and open opportunities.
7. Costing a Proposal
We have produced a checklist of potential costings, which should be considered when putting a research proposal together. From this checklist there are links to websites that could be of interest.8. Student Grants and Bursaries
For those looking for funding for a further degree, it is also worth searching our database for 'Types of awards' matching Studentships, Training Bursaries and Fellowships to see if any are applicable to you. Failing that, we have added Some Information on Student Bursaries and Grants, which might help. Strictly speaking it is outside our main brief, but we often get asked for this type of funding so have included those we know about.9. Applying for Funding
Richard Jones and Brian Payne gave permission for us to publish some extracts from their book, which deal with 'Writing a Good Proposal' . Though initially written for laboratory workers and clinicians, it will also be useful for other healthcare professionals. If you want to buy the book, there is a link to it from the main page under Project Costing and Other Help.10. On-line Application Forms
Some organisation do not have their own application forms and you might find it useful to use our generic forms, either in the entirety or an edited version of them11. Feedback
Please help us make our site better by telling us what you like about it and what you don't, as well as what else would you like us to provide. This can be done either by our feedback form or by email.
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