Environment Research Funders' Forum

How to search

Options for searching:

• Choose the appropriate categories to search using the checkboxes (Descriptions, Classifications, Organisations, People) (all are checked by default).
• Choose your date range either using the dropdown menu or by selecting a specific date range for the starting dates of projects you want to see (default is "anytime").
• Choose whether you want to display ALL the records which meet your chosen criteria or only the more recently updated ones (default is ALL records).
• Choose whether you want to display information about programmes only, projects only or both programmes and projects (default is both - "ALL types").
• Choose how many projects you want displayed per page when the Summary results are returned (default is 20 projects per page).

Enter your search term(s) in the text box and click Search.

What is included in the search:

• If the Descriptions checkbox is ticked, your search will include Titles, Short titles, Descriptions, Summaries, Objectives and Funders' IDs of the projects and programmes; Note: if you are looking for an Environment Agency project using its Proposal Number or Science Code you need to tick the Classifications checkbox, as these codes have been applied as Classification information in the database.
• If the Classifications checkbox is ticked, your search will include the names and values of all classification information related to the projects and programmes, whether these are the funder's own classifications or keywords or classifications on the ERFF Environmental Classification Scheme.
• If the Organisations checkbox is ticked, your search will include the names and acronyms of all organisations (and units within organisations) related to the projects; note that not all organisations have been given acronyms in the database, so your search may be more successful if you use the full name of the organisation. However, acronyms have been included in the database for all the ERFF member organisations (so you can search for, e.g., NERC, EA, Defra). Note also that the best way of finding projects linked to the Environment Agency is to search for EA or "EA" with just the Organisations checkbox ticked. If you search for "Environment Agency" (in quotes) you will also find projects linked to Northern Ireland Environment Agency, and if you search using the phrase 'Environment Agency' but not enclosed in quotes you will also find projects linked to the Scottish Environment Protection Agency as well as the Northern Ireland Environment Agency, and any other organisation whose name includes both words. If you have the Descriptions checkbox ticked at the same time, you will also find any other projects whose descriptions mention "environment agency" or 'environment' and 'agency', which may not be what you intend!
• If the People checkbox is ticked, your search will include the first names, family names and honorific titles of all people related to the projects (but not the initials field, which would lead to too many false hits). Note that we only have information about people as it has been supplied to us by funders; not all named individuals have first name entries in the database, and we are unable to determine whether "A Jones" listed in the information from one funder is the same person as "Alan Jones" listed by another, so you may need to search for more than one variant of a name, or on surname only, to find all the instances of the person you are looking for.

Search logic:

• By default, searches will look for all projects containing ALL of the individual words or phrases you enter in the search box separated by at least one space, i.e. if you enter the words freshwater fish pollution the search will look for projects containing freshwater AND fish AND pollution. You can also use the Boolean logic operators OR and NOT explicitly, and you can be explicit about the use of AND if you wish. You can also use a negative sign (-) instead of the word NOT. E.g. badger OR fox NOT rabbit would return projects containing the word badger or the word fox, but not projects which also contain the word rabbit, as would badger OR fox –rabbit. The minus sign must immediately precede the word which it qualifies, with no spaces (whereas AND, OR and NOT must be followed by a space before the start of the word which they qualify).
• Enclose search phrases within double quotes, e.g. "freshwater fish", to find only projects in which these words occur adjacent to one another in that order.
• You can use a wildcard character (either * or %) to search for a string of characters within a longer word (e.g. flood* will find flooded, flooding, floods as well as flood).
• You can search for a known project using its Funder's ID; make sure the Descriptions checkbox is ticked for this search. If you are using an Environment Agency Proposal or Science Code ID to search for a project you need to tick the Classifications checkbox rather than the Descriptions box.
• Searches for People should be able to find "Firstname Familyname" combinations but only, of course, if we have been given this information by the funder. If you search for Firstname Familyname, e.g. Martin Jones, as separate words rather than as a phrase enclosed in double quotes you will find projects in which Martin Jones is involved but you will also find projects involving both, for example, Trevor Martin and William Jones.
• Searches are not sensitive to case, i.e. it does not matter whether you use upper case or lower case letters for your search terms and your Boolean logic operators: the search will look for all instances of the terms and will recognise Boolean operators whether they are expressed as AND/OR/NOT or as and/or/not (or any combination of upper and lower case).

What you should find:

Summary results grid

• Whichever checkboxes are ticked, the result of your search, if successful, will return summary information about one or more projects. If you are searching on Descriptions and you have used a rather general term you may get a very large number of projects in the summary results. The projects which have most occurrences of your search term(s) in the relevant fields will be at the top of the list and those which have fewest occurrences will be near the bottom. You may want to introduce an extra word or two to your search to reduce the number of hits and find the most relevant ones. If you are searching specifically on Organisations the projects which have your search term as Lead Funder will occur at the top of the list. If your search term is an organisation name but you tick the Descriptions checkbox as well as the Organisations checkbox you will also find projects which have that organisation mentioned in their descriptions, and these may occur near the top of the list if there are several mentions of the organisation name included in the description.
• If you hover your cursor over the magnifying glass at the left hand end of the summary results grid you will be able to see the first part of any descriptive information we have about the project or programme.
• There should be a title of some sort for every project and programme displayed. Sometimes these are not very informative. We have provided what information we have been given by funders; we hope that the quality of information provided will improve in time, as the use and perceived value of the database increases and as funders improve their own systems for collecting and processing project information.
• Most projects have Lead Funder and Lead Research Organisation information linked to them. For some projects we are unable to tell who the Lead Funder, or the Lead Research Organisation, is, and these cells may be blank in the summary results grid. You should find all the information we have about organisations and/or people related to the project or programme in the detailed results (see below).
• Some member organisations have given us financial information about (some or all of) their work but asked us to keep it confidential. We are able to use it in analysis but not to display the information for individual projects on the website. Where the "total funding" cell in the summary results grid is empty it is either because that information is confidential or because we do not have a figure for total funding as such; in the latter case you may find some information about funding in individual years in the detailed results for that project.
• The project end dates listed in the summary results grid are "actual" end dates where we have these and "planned" end dates where we have no "actual" end date. The detailed information for the project shows more precisely what information we have about the start and end dates of the project.
• We have included doctoral research in the database information made available through the website except where the research has been terminated after less than two years. Names of individual students have generally been kept confidential but the relevant supervisor's name is usually provided.
• We have included the Funder's ID for the project in the information shown in the summary grid because we expect this will be a useful facility for users from ERFF member organisations. Some detailed project descriptions include reference to other work from the same funder using their own IDs; for this and other reasons we have included the Funder's IDs in the fields which you can search for using the text search box. For most funders you need to have the Descriptions checkbox ticked when searching using their Funder's IDs. For Environment Agency projects, if you are searching using the EA's Proposal or Science Code IDs you need to have the Classifications checkbox ticked.

Detailed results

• You can see the full detail that we hold on projects and programmes either one project at a time, or as a group selected from one page of the Summary Results grid.
• To see the details for a single project, click on 'Details' at the right hand end of the Summary grid. From the details for this project you can navigate directly to the details for an adjacent project in the list, or to the first or last project in the (entire) list using the links at the top or bottom of the details page.
• To see the details for a group of projects choose the ones you want to see using the checkboxes at the left of the Summary grid. The checkbox at the top of this column can be used to select, or deselect, all of the projects on that page and you can then deselect, or select, individual projects as you choose. Click on the 'Show details for all ticked results' button to display the details. At present the maximum number of projects per page, and hence the maximum number of projects for which you can view details at one time, has been set to 100 to avoid overloading our server.

Forthcoming developments we hope to include:

• An "advanced search" option which will display items such as the ERFF Environmental Classification Scheme, other classification schemes which have been mapped to the ERFF scheme, and a full list of organisations included in the database, and offer search options based on these. We will not be in a position to implement the advanced search option until the majority of projects have been 'coded' on the ERFF scheme; this is a major undertaking and we are unlikely to be able to complete it until some time in 2010.

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Version 1.2.1.0

Information sources:

The database currently contains information about environmental research projects and programmes provided to us by the following organisations:

• BBSRC
• Defra
• DFID
• DfT
• Environment Agency
• EPSRC
• ESRC
• Forestry Commission
• Food Standards Agency
• HSE
• JNCC
• Met Office
• MRC
• Natural England
• NERC
• NIEA
• SEPA
• SNIFFER (Scotland & Northern Ireland Forum for Environmental Research)
• Welsh Assembly Government

Dates of the work:

The majority of this work has been funded during the period April 2005 to March 2008 or later; some data providers have included information about earlier work than this but one or two organisations have not been able to provide a complete dataset for the period 2005-2008. Environment Agency and SEPA have also given us information about work planned for 2009/10. We shall continue to add projects and programmes to the database as we collect more recent information from our member organisations.

NERC Research Centres:

With the exception of the Proudman Oceanographic Laboratory who have supplied information directly, the majority of information on work carried out (using public funds) by the NERC Research Centres (British Antarctic Survey, British Geological Survey and Centre for Ecology and Hydrology) has been provided to us centrally by NERC and needs to be checked by the individual Research Centres before we are able to make it publicly available.

Information on some projects involving NERC Research Centres has been supplied by other sources, e.g. where a Research Centre is a contractor or a collaborator in a project funded by another ERFF member, and these projects are displayed in search results.

Financial information:

Some financial information in the database has been marked as confidential by the data supplier. Where this is the case ERFF will be able to use this information for analysis but is not able to publish figures for the individual projects. Examples are individual studentships or some individual research projects with private sector contractors.

SNIFFER financial information:

Financial information provided to us by SNIFFER is in bands rather than individual figures. We have allocated a "representative" individual figure for each project to enable us to include these projects in any later analysis work. The individual figures shown in our database and the equivalent SNIFFER bands are as follows:

• £20K = <£20K
• £35K = £20K - £50K
• £75K = £50K - £100K
• £300K = £100K - £500K
• £500K = >£500K

PhD studentships:

We have included information on PhD research projects where it has been provided, and have flagged these as such in the search results. EPSRC provides funding for doctoral research by means of block grants to universities and is therefore unable to provide details of individual projects. In future we may also have less information about doctoral research funded by other Research Councils.

Masters' courses:

The database does include information about Masters' courses to enable us to carry out analysis on training, but as these do not themselves constitute environmental research we do not currently include these in the information displayed in response to searches.

ERFF classification scheme:

Very few of the projects in the database have as yet been classified on the ERFF environmental research classification scheme. Once this has been done, we expect to make available an "advanced search" option which allows projects to be selected using the scheme directly, or using a simplified "mapping" of the scheme to environmental issues. We hope also to be able to offer other "customised" mappings such as mapping to LWEC interests or to categories defined in terms of the ERFF scheme by individual ERFF member organisations.

October 2009:

This updated version has a large number of enhancements, including improving the speed of response for more lengthy searches, presenting summary information in a more intuitive order, presenting more of the details we have for each project/programme in a more easily readable form, adding links to all associated projects and programmes where we know about them, allowing viewing and downloading of up to 100 projects/programmes at one time, and remembering your previous setting for the number of results to show per page (if your browser allows cookies). Here is a more detailed (but not necessarily comprehensive) list:

• You can now filter your search criteria to return records updated or added to the database in the last week/ month/ 3 months/ 6 months or year (the default setting is to return 'all' results).
• You can now search by ERFF ID (when the Descriptions box is checked).
• If your browser allows cookies, the interface will now remember the setting you used last time for the number of results to display per page.
• You can now select any or all of the results shown on a single page of summary results and request further details for all of these at one time, up to a maximum of 100 results per page.
• You can navigate through the details of projects/ programmes in the summary list via a Previous/Next link on the details page of the activity you are currently viewing (and also skip to the first or last activity in the list).
• Project/programme details now include links to associated programmes and projects.
• The details page now includes the name of the organisation that provided the information about the project or programme.
• Where available, the contact details (address, telephone number, website, email) for organisations involved in a project are now shown in the details page.
• You can download the details of up to 100 projects at a time into an Excel or XML format file.