Objective
Learn how to write and when to include a funding statement in your manuscript.
Why include a funding statement?
A funding statement is a way for authors to claim ownership of any potential biases, announce financial affiliations, and promote maximum transparency in their work. A funding statement indicates whether or not the authors received funding (institutional, private and/or corporate financial support) for the work reported in their manuscript.
When to have a funding statement
A funding statement should be included in a paper any time the study has received grants, or other financial support. Best practice is to always include a funding statement, even if to indicate that financial support was not used.
How Ripeta thinks about funding statements
At Ripeta, we use natural language processing and machine learning to search for, identify and extract quality indicators of trust from submitted manuscripts. The inclusion of a funding statement falls under the category of Trust in Research — a crucial aspect of trust in science.
How to write a funding statement
Where does the funding statement go?
This scientific quality indicator usually appears as a separate section within a research article, but sometimes the funding statement is located in the Acknowledgements section of the research article. If the journal doesn’t have a clear location for a funding statement, do include it in the Acknowledgements section!
What is in a funding statement?
Guidelines for funding statements may differ based on the journal, so always check the author guidelines before submitting. With that said, funding statement will usually include:
Whether or not the study was partially or fully funded or not funded at all
Obviously some research is funded, some is not. In all cases, the funding status of the work should be stated in the funding statement.
This research did not receive any specific grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.
If the research is fully or partially funded by a federal, private, commercial, or non-profit entity, the names of those organizations should be listed in the funding statement.
This paper represents independent research part-funded by the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Biomedical Research Centre at South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust.
If applicable, the grant number(s) in brackets, separated by commas
Directly referencing the grant number is also critical for funding agencies to see the impact of their investments. Typically journals prefer for the grant number to be in brackets directly after the funding agency’s name.
This work was supported by the National Key R&D Program of China [grant number 2016YFC0901604]; the National Natural Science Foundation of China [grant number 31771478] and the National Key R&D Program of China [grant number 2018YFC0910401] to Weizhong Li.
This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China [grant number 31560549, 31260464].
Funding statement template
In this article, we discussed the anatomy of a funding statement when research is funded or not. For more information on our indicators, visit our website at ripeta.com.
