Strategic Signals

Strategic Signals provides the geographically and strategically oriented intelligence layer of Pulse. It analyses the funding landscape through lenses of regional distribution, discipline coverage, and emerging terminology to identify patterns, gaps, and trends that inform research strategy.

Regional Funding Intelligence

The Regional Intelligence view analyses how funding opportunities distribute across geographic regions. It surfaces which regions are the primary targets or sources of funding activity, helping you understand the geographic dimension of the funding landscape.

This analysis is useful for international collaboration planning -- identifying regions with strong funding activity in your research area can guide decisions about where to seek partners or where to target applications.

Geographic Distribution Analysis

Building on the regional view, the Geographic Distribution analysis provides a more granular breakdown of funding across countries and regions. It visualises funding concentration and spread, making it straightforward to identify geographic clusters of activity and regions that may be comparatively underserved.

Gap Assessment

The Gap Assessment identifies areas where funding coverage is thin relative to research activity or strategic importance. This analysis crosses multiple dimensions:

• Funding Research Gap Analysis -- Identifies research areas where academic activity is strong but dedicated funding is limited, suggesting potential opportunities for proposals that bridge the gap.
• Discipline and funding type breakdowns -- Reveals specific discipline-funding type combinations that are underrepresented in the current landscape.

Gaps represent strategic opportunities. Research teams that can position proposals in underserved areas often face less competition and can make stronger cases for the novelty and necessity of their work.

Trending Terms

The Trending Terms visualization tracks the evolution of terminology across funding calls and programme descriptions. It identifies terms that are appearing with increasing frequency, suggesting shifts in funder priorities and language.

Monitoring trending terms serves two purposes:

1. Strategic awareness -- Understanding which concepts are gaining prominence helps you anticipate future funding directions.
2. Proposal language alignment -- Using terminology that aligns with current funder language increases the relevance and readability of your proposals to evaluators.

Visualization

Strategic Signals uses several chart types to present its analysis, built with the Recharts library:

• Composed charts (combined line and bar) for showing trends alongside absolute values.
• Pie charts for proportion-based breakdowns such as regional distribution.
• Bar charts for comparative analysis across categories such as disciplines or funding types.

All charts are interactive, supporting hover states for detailed data inspection and click-through for drill-down where applicable.

Related Sections

• Thematic Intelligence -- For discipline and topic analysis that complements the geographic and gap-based views here.
• Research Frontiers -- For research momentum analysis that can validate gap assessment findings against academic publication data.
• Programmes -- For programme-specific statistics behind the aggregate signals.