Making a difference: Impact Report 2021

Medical research charities are an integral part of the UK’s health research system. They respond to the priorities of people living in the UK and ensure that research into diseases and medical conditions is relevant, necessary and impactful. They fund research at all stages of the pathway from the lab to the clinic and support the people and infrastructure behind the research. In this way, they enable breakthroughs that would not otherwise have been possible.

Tracking and demonstrating impact is not easy or straightforward. Transformative breakthroughs involve many different players working collaboratively and in sequence, often in non-linear paths and involving dead-ends or unexpected turns. And most of all, impact takes time. For charities to map their contribution to these breakthroughs, they must routinely collect research outputs and outcomes – steps along the way to impact - from their researchers.

Some AMRC members use an online tool called Researchfish that allows them to collect the outputs and outcomes of their research funding from researchers over time. Collecting data in this consistent way allows us to pool data together from many different charities and perform a cross-sector analysis of the outcomes of the research funded by our members. In addition, because other major funders in the UK use the platform, it allows us to look at AMRC data in a wider context of public funding.

We are proud to share this new report that shows what research funded by AMRC members can achieve, highlights examples of excellence, and puts charities’ role into the context of the wider research system. It follows on from our 2017 and 2019 impact reports, incorporating three more years of Researchfish data and new stories of how charity-funded research has impacted patients and society. The report is structured around three important ways in which charities add immense value:

Meeting the needs of patients
Boosting researchers’ careers
Supporting the research system

You can download a PDF version of this report and there is also an accompanying infographic.

If you have any questions, please contact us at [email protected].

We would like to thank the Medical Research Council, Interfolio UK, and all participating organisations for making this report possible.

This report was published on 15 November 2021.

Analysis methods

AMRC dataset preparation

The data in this report was downloaded from Researchfish in July 2021. It is important to note that the data in the system is live, so researchers may change their outputs in the future or the data could change due to further cleaning or mapping. AMRC does not have the in-depth knowledge of the grants which the individual charities have, therefore cleaning of the dataset was at the very top-level and so the data used is based purely on what the principal investigators inputted into Researchfish. Any obvious outliers were further explored by AMRC. Additional steps taken to prepare, clean and supplement the dataset are outlined below.

Data cleaning

Test grants or any grants without submitted outcomes were removed.
Some outputs ask for specific dates (Publications, Spin outs and Further Funding). In these cases, outputs were removed if they were reported to occur before the start date of the grant they were attributed to.
Unpublished publications were removed.
Inaccurate spin out companies were removed.
Further Funding instances from the same organisation as the grant it was attributed to were removed.
Often an output was attributed to more than one grant from the same funder or from different funders. These were de-duplicated where possible when calculating unique numbers for the high-level analyses (for example total number of publications produced by all funders). Duplicate outputs from the same principal investigator were excluded by removing any outputs which had identical output IDs (assigned to the output by Researchfish). However, it is far harder to identify identical outputs which were created by multiple principal investigators as these will have different output IDs.
If there was no month given with the year of an output, then January was used as the default. This is consistent with other funders who have analysed Researchfish data.

Categorisation and supplementation

Locations were standardised and countries were added based on the GRID ID of the organisation or institution where relevant (for example RHT, Collaborations, Further Funding, Next Destination).
Organisations were categorised according to sectors for relevant outputs (Collaborations, Further Funding, Next Destination).
When funders upload grants to Researchfish, it is not mandatory to assign grant type classifications (e.g. project, PhD studentship) to them. Where possible AMRC have added these classifications to them based on data which has previously been submitted to AMRC by funders. These were also mapped onto the relevant “project”, “people” or “infrastructure” category. If there was no classification available then grants were coded as other/unknown. 2.2% of grants (227) had a grant type of other/unknown.

Additional notes

Due to rounding of numbers and percentages, figures may not always equal the totals or 100%.
If further funding amounts were given in different currencies then Researchfish automatically applied the exchange rates based on the rates at the point at which the output has been entered into Researchfish. The equivalent amount in Pounds Sterling is given in the download field [Funding Organisation Further Funding Value].
Collaborations can be made up of multiple partners. For this report, each separate partner is counted as a ‘collaborator’.