The Top Grant Opportunities feature helps universities and research institutions discover relevant funding calls by matching their research output with open grant opportunities. The feature analyses publications and compares them with funding calls to identify opportunities that are closely aligned in topic, scope, and research fit.
Where do the funding calls come from?
Every day, ScoutinScience automatically pulls in open funding calls from sources such as the EU Funding & Tenders Portal, the Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek (NWO), KWF Kankerbestrijding, Stichting ALS Nederland, and other relevant funding databases. Each new grant is read, processed, and tagged with its scientific field or topic before the matching operation starts.
Is the matching just a keyword search?
No. The matching is not based only on keywords. ScoutinScience uses an AI model trained on real examples of successful publication–grant matches from the recent past. This allows the model to compare meaning and scientific relevance, instead of only looking for similar words.
How does the matching work?
For every publication and grant call, ScoutinScience extracts both the publication's content and the grant's description. The model converts each text into a numerical "fingerprint" that captures its meaning. It then measures how closely the two fingerprints align, and refines the match using specific in-house criteria drawn from the publication and grant metadata.
What does the match label mean?
Each publication–grant pair receives a score indicating how closely the research aligns with the funding call in terms of meaning, topic, and scope. A higher score means a stronger connection between the publication and the grant call. We then expand the score to the author-match, utilizing the author's profile metadata to connect a main lead to this grant. Through extensive testing, we've defined score ranges for the strongest matches and labelled them so users can quickly spot which opportunities are worth exploring first.
How are low-quality matches filtered out?
The dashboard or report does not show every possible publication–grant match. ScoutinScience applies an algorithmic threshold: a minimum quality level that a match must reach before it is shown as a recommendation. This threshold is based on the model’s assessment of the match, including the overall similarity between the publication and the grant call. Weaker matches are filtered out, leaving users with the funding opportunities most closely connected to their research output.
Does the model improve over time?
Yes. As more confirmed matches become available, the AI model is retrained and improved. This helps the system become better at recognising meaningful alignment between research output and funding opportunities.
What is the benefit for research support teams?
Top Grant Opportunities helps research support teams move from manual searching to data-led discovery. Instead of screening large numbers of calls from scratch, teams can start from their own research output and focus on the funding opportunities that are most relevant to their institution’s expertise.
Distribution of relevant topics
Our dashboard also includes a Distribution of Grant Opportunities view, which shows how available funding calls are spread across scientific topics. Users can select a topic to explore the relevant opportunities within that area.
Are there more grant-related features planned?
Yes. ScoutinScience is working on additional grant intelligence features, including a grant assessment score that will help estimate the likelihood of a grant application being approved.