By Simon Hettrick.

Last year, I found myself talking about funding aggregators and whether we could link to them on the Institute’s website. At the time, I thought that it was a little strange: why the plural? Why would anyone need more than one aggregator? At first, there might be an aggregator for UK funding, one for Europe and one for industry, but surely that wouldn’t last for long, because someone would just write an uber-aggregator that combined all three. It turns out that this might have happened.

I’ve just added Research Professional to our list of useful resources. It cites itself as “the world's leading provider of news and funding information for research professionals” and covers “academia to politics, technology to the arts”. The people who run the service are called Research (not a good name if you wish to prevent confusion in the research market, but let’s overlook that problem) and produce a number of publications from Research Europe to Research Caribbean. In fact, they say that provide the “largest database of research funding opportunities available worldwide”.

I took a quick look at the Research Professional website, and it certainly seem comprehensive. After logging in with my university email address, I was presented with a handy interface into which I typed as many random research-related words as I could think of. I was quickly presented with funding opportunities from all round the world. The search can be focussed by selecting specific countries, funding agencies, closing dates and many, many more variables. And a lot of information is presented for each call, such as the closing date, the award type and the frequency with which the call is made.

Is Research Professional one aggregator to rule them all? With masses of funding information and news, it would appear so. However, we want to know your views, so if you think that there’s a better aggregator out there, let us know or comment below.