KMi secured a new research project “Tracking Stars and Unicorns” funded by the UKRI Metascience unit, with an award of £310,646, to look at successful and unsuccessful proposals within all UKRI councils to track research trends, assess UK competitiveness against global competitors, and understand appropriate funding mechanisms to better support the development of Early Career Researchers.
This project is central to the UKRI’s Metascience programme, and will have unprecedented access to both funded and unfunded UKRI applications. The project’s key objective is to formulate policies regarding the funding landscape required to encourage the development of tangible, financially viable research ideas.
The project started in September 2025 and will run for 12 months, in partnership with the University of Edinburgh (leading institution), University of Bristol, University of Cambridge and University of Oxford.
This project will leverage AI to analyse “stars” (successful research careers of individuals, measured by metrics like papers and citations for Early Career Researchers) and “unicorns” (central ideas or concepts in research proposals and papers associated with new societal and economic innovations). Specifically, the project involves tracking the career paths of researchers based on different funding types, analysing how research ideas evolve over time, and assessing the global standing of UK research concepts, including ideas that gain traction internationally after being unfunded domestically.
At the OU, Dr. Angelo Salatino will focus on processing text from the research proposal, extracting relevant research entities (e.g., topics, methodologies, approaches, artefacts, tasks and others) to understand their development over time.
Dr Angelo Salatino commented: “This is a fantastic and unique initiative from the UKRI Metascience Unit, making the UK a leader in this area. It is incredibly exciting to have a funded project focusing on themes that are very close to my heart, and I am looking forward to diving into this research for the next 12 months.”
This research project underscores The Open University’s leading role in AI-driven metascience, reinforcing its role in shaping the future of scholarly communication and research funding.
The UKRI Metascience Unit was launched in late 2023. It is a joint effort between the UK’s Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) and UK Research and Innovation (UKRI). Its mission is to apply scientific principles to the funding and execution of science itself, ultimately boosting efficiency, research quality, and policy results. More information about the Metascience unit and their experiments is available on A year in metascience (2025). Building on OU’s strengths in Metascience and Artificial Intelligence, the proposal was successfully funded.
