Key Features of the HRCS
The HRCS is a system for classifying and analysing biomedical and health research funding. Its role is to faciliate research management by answering strategic questions about investment.
Its main benefits are:
- It covers the full spectrum of biomedical and health research - from basic to applied - across all areas of health and disease
- It directly links funding to research objectives
- It has a 4 year history of being used to classify thousands of research awards of different types from many funding organisations and settings
- It is a common stable system allowing meaningful comparisons between different portfolios
- It is open source and freely available
Some notable aspects of the HRCS are:
- It was designed for a specific purpose - to provide a broad overview of the strategic centre of gravity of a set of research awards
- It is based on the main research question to be answered within the lifetime of the award.Therefore it does not capture all facets of the research or potential downstream outcomes and hence does not replace other keyword systems which enable searching and finding
- It captures costs directly tied to a research aim and therefore excludes indirect background support for research (where there is no associated research question). This means it is not a financial audit tool
