Success rates for some UK research council grant schemes have fallen below 10 per cent, leading to warnings that universities must “stay realistic” about the likelihood of their academics winning substantial external funding.
Recently released board minutes from the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) show some members had expressed concern over the “high number of rejections” in a funding round in which the majority of the 595 grant applications were rejected on quality grounds prior to panel review.
Figures from the meeting requested by Times Higher Education show that those applying for grants for secondary data analysis projects (those using existing data to answer new questions) fared particularly badly, with only 40 of 108 applications (37 per cent) making it to panel review. Of these, 25 per cent (10 applications) were funded, giving a success rate of 9 per cent.
For standard research grant applications in the ESRC round closing in May 2023, which were assessed in July 2024, 144 out of 335 applications (43 per cent) made it to panel review, of which 20 per cent (29) were funded – an overall success rate of 9 per cent.
For those applying for ESRC new investigator grants, just 66 of 152 applicants (44 per cent) reached panel review, of which 21 were funded – about 14 per cent of all applicants.
If success rates are calculated based on those reaching the panel stage, the figures are 20 per cent for research grants, 32 per cent for new investigators and 25 per cent for secondary data analysis.
The results highlight the growing difficulty of securing external research funding in UK academia at a time when some universities are making research time conditional on winning such awards.
Last month Newcastle University said it wanted to reduce the “proportion of research activity [by staff] that is currently unfunded”, adding that “unfunded research is defined as research not directly charged or recovered from externally funded research grants and contracts.”
Some staff are worried that this will require them to secure research council funding if they are to continue research activity at their current levels, despite the one-in-11 success rates, as seen in the recent ESRC funding round.
Commenting on the success rates, however, Imran Rasul, president-elect of the Royal Economic Society, said economists were not unused to these high rejection rates.
“If you compare it to submissions for some economics journals, they will also have rejection rates above 90 per cent,” said Rasul, professor of economics at UCL.
“If the review process is helping academics to improve by providing feedback, as economics journals do, then that is important.”
However, it was crucial that universities remained “realistic” about their academics’ chances of winning a research grant given the high rejection rates seen at the ESRC, continued Rasul.
“If there is a divergence between what universities believe regarding the likelihood of winning a grant and the truth, this is concerning,” he said, adding that universities “should stay realistic about how often faculty can win grant funding”.
Hamish Low, professor of economics at the University of Oxford, said the latest figures highlighted a broader “move away from QR funding towards research council funding” – a trend also recently noted by Imperial College London president Hugh Brady when he decried a 16 per cent real-terms fall in the value of QR funding since 2010.
“The movement away from QR funding of social sciences has placed particular pressure on winning grants. This shift away from QR is particularly true in economics,” said Low.
“This places control over research agendas and who has research time with the research councils rather than, for example, through peer-reviewed journal publications.
“But the statistics on the success rates at the ESRC point to the difficulty of getting that funding. Worse, the high rejection rates even before reaching the expert panel review creates uncertainty about the criteria being used.
“The underlying question is who should determine what research should be funded. My concern is that it is not clear who is determining what research should be funded.”
According to the ESRC board minutes, the high rejection rates were probably related to a “significant surge in applications” which could be related to the introduction of a deadline that led to “rushed and therefore poor-quality applications”, although universities are expected to screen potential bids internally to weed out weak applications.
An ESRC spokeswoman said that the specific funding round had seen “twice as many applications rejected at the peer review stage based on the standard scoring criteria and thresholds”, which could be related to “approximately a year’s worth” of applications made to a single round, resulting in “rushed” bids of “poorer quality”.
