Tips to Optimise Your Researchfish Submission for Both You and Your Funder
Consider
- Connect your Researchfish account to your ORCID account to enable data to be harvested from ORCID ready to attribute in Researchfish.
- Use persistent Unique identifiers (for example DOI, clinicaltrial.gov ID) for your outcomes, where they exist, and make use of the lookups available when reporting within Researchfish.
- Read any funder-specific guidance text that your funder may have set up in the platform at the top of your award page or on their website.
- Aim to provide a well-rounded overview of what the award has produced up to that point in time.
- Utilise more than just one category of information (i.e. outcome type), if that has been accomplished, consider all the areas of impact which have come about from your award.
- Be selective in your reporting, only attribute outcomes which relate to the award.
- Write for a general audience as your submission may be used for a variety of purposes by your funder and should complement/build on the information submitted in your funder’s annual/final reports (if they are requested by them).
- Answer any additional questions which have been assigned to your award by your funder, you can refer to the guidance on completing extra sections for further detail on the mandatory status of these sections.
- remember that you can add and update outcomes at any point throughout the year outside of a submission period.
Avoid
- Avoid superfluous information, for example, there is no need to add information to each category if no outcomes have occurred.
- Don’t report things that may happen in the future, rather than benefits or changes that have already occurred.
- Don’t refer to unreferenced reports outside of the Researchfish system (e.g. see annual report).
- Don’t include confidential or personal information that you do not have permission to share (e.g. names of individuals in free text fields, shares commercial-in-confidence information).
Check out this article on how the information is used by your funder for more details on how your funders use information submitted via Researchfish or check out this article about what happens to the information entered into Researchfish for more information about how data gets into and out of Researchfish as well as what information we pass on to third parties.
Any questions relating to your grant or reporting requirements can be directed to your funder who will be better placed to answer queries about what they specifically use the information for - their contact details can be found by going to the Our Community tab when you are logged into Researchfish, and selecting the relevant funder.