Funding Trends

Funding Trends alerts (type: trends) monitor the evolving funding landscape to detect shifts in priorities, emerging research topics, and changes in budget allocations. This alert type combines two kinds of intelligence into a single notification:

• Emerging keywords -- Terms and topics that are appearing with increasing frequency across funding calls.
• Budget trends -- Changes in funding levels, new allocations, and programme expansions or contractions.

How It Works

The system continuously analyzes new funding opportunities, call texts, and programme metadata to detect patterns. For keywords, it tracks mention frequency over time and flags terms showing significant growth. For budgets, it compares allocation data across cycles to identify meaningful changes.

An LLM synthesizes both signals into a coherent narrative that explains what is changing and why it matters to your research.

Setting Up a Funding Trends Alert

1. Navigate to Smart Alerts from the ArkSearch submenu.
2. Click Create Alert and select Funding Trends.
3. Define your monitoring scope:
   • Seed keywords -- Enter keywords that describe your research domain. The system monitors for emerging terms semantically related to these seeds.
   • Programmes (optional) -- Restrict trend detection to specific funding programmes if you only care about trends within a particular context.
4. Choose your frequency: weekly or monthly. Weekly is recommended, as trends develop over days rather than hours.
5. Save the alert.

What You Receive

Each notification includes results of two types:

Emerging Keyword Results

For each trending term detected:

• Keyword -- The term or phrase that is gaining traction.
• Mention count -- How many times the keyword has appeared in recent funding calls.
• Growth percentage -- The rate at which mentions are increasing compared to the previous period.
• AI context -- Where the keyword is appearing (which programmes, which types of calls), how quickly it is growing, and how it relates to your seed keywords.

Budget Trend Results

For each programme showing significant budget movement:

• Title -- The programme or funding line affected.
• Year -- The budget cycle being compared.
• Opportunity count -- The number of active calls associated with the trend.
• AI analysis -- Whether funding is expanding or contracting, the magnitude of the change, and what it means for applicants.

Why This Matters

Research funding priorities evolve continuously. Policy shifts, technological breakthroughs, and societal challenges all drive changes in what funders support. Funding Trends alerts translate these shifts into concrete signals:

• Anticipate new calls -- If a keyword is trending in early call texts, dedicated funding calls around that topic are likely to follow.
• Refine your proposals -- Understanding which terms are gaining traction helps you frame proposals using language that resonates with current funder priorities.
• Identify growing programmes -- Budget increases signal expanded opportunities and potentially better odds for applicants.
• Spot contracting areas -- Decreasing budgets may mean tighter competition, prompting you to redirect effort toward growing programmes.