Setting research priorities

Reviewed: April 2025

Research priority setting aims to identify the appropriate research areas to focus on. If done well, it considers the needs and preferences of the end users of research, including the views of clinicians, researchers, patients and the public.

The approach to setting research priorities may differ across organisations, but this usually involves two stages:

Information gathering
Refinement and prioritisation

Information gathering

Evaluate the previous research strategy (if available) and its impact to understand what worked and what didn’t in its design and implementation.
Conduct a landscape review and gap analysis. This involves identifying what has been and is currently being funded in the field(s) of interest and related areas and by who. Mapping the research landscape enables charities to identify funding gaps and collaborators in their area of focus, and to establish and maintain their unique contribution.

Charities should consult stakeholders in their strategy creation to ensure it meets the needs of the community and has a unique and/or vital role. This engagement could be done through surveys, workshops/focus groups, interviews, and other consultation approaches.

This can also be complemented by a literature review of recent publications, and outputs, and data analysis on grants and publications through services like Dimensions or using the outcomes of the UK Health Research Analysis, and disease specific analysis like Rare Diseases Research Landscape Project Report.

It’s worth considering some of these questions:

What is the mission or remit of the charity and how will research support this within a specific time period? For example, target disease area and/or research focus and/or funding objective.

Within your area what level of target or focus will there be? Within the target disease area, what conditions will you focus on? Those that are rare and/or receive little funding, or those that are common and have the highest disease burden? Will you cover a range?
Funding objective – careers, geographical area, links with another institution e.g. hospital
Research focus and stage – basic, applied, translation, uptake and adoption, health services research
Who do you see benefiting from the research outcomes? E.g. UK population or subset (e.g. age range or ethnicity or geographic subpopulation)

Where are the gaps identified in both your scientific area and the research field?

Who else is funding in your disease area and what are their research areas, mission and aims?
What needs are not currently being met and is anyone undertaking research that aims to answer questions that can solve this?

Refinement and prioritisation

When considering the evidence and insight from the first stage, prioritisation criteria can be applied to the landscape analysis and identified gaps to refine and define the questions that funding will answer and problems funding will focus on solving.

If ranking priorities, research areas or questions, the below questions can provide guidance for this process. Again, multiple stakeholders can be part of the prioritisation process.

Suggested questions to establish or rank their prioritisation criteria:

What are the charity’s risk preferences? For example, will the organisation support fewer high-value and high-risk, high reward research options? Or will the risk profile be balanced and diversified between levels of risk and reward?
What will have the greatest or quickest impact for your community?
What is a medical research charity best placed to fund?
What is the likelihood that the question will address an unmet patient need?

Example of priority setting:

Many charities undertake The James Lind Alliance’s Priority Setting Partnership (PSP), a method of gap analysis and prioritisation. They enable clinicians, patients, carers, and research funders to work together to identify and set research priorities in particular areas of health and care and focus on bringing tangible benefits to people in need. The JLA has conducted PSPs in over 100 areas. To date, more than 78 AMRC members have been involved in PSPs. Charities can be involved in different ways from funding, to providing secretariat, to being part of the steering group for staff or trustees or patient reps. The process identifies questions that can’t be answered by existing research, produces a Top 10 list of jointly agreed research priorities, and ensures that this is widely disseminated to researchers and research funders.

Many charities then use the PSP to frame their priorities within their research strategy. For example:

Parkinson's UK explain how they used the Parkinson's JLA PSP to guide the research areas they will prioritise to improve the daily lives of people with Parkinson's disease.
MS Society used the MS JLA PSP to formulate their research priorities, which in turn supported their 2018-2022 research strategy and its extension.
Crohn's & Colitis UK used the 2015 Inflammatory Bowel Disease JLA PSP priorities to frame their 2022-2024 research strategy and how progress against its objectives would be measured.

For further guidance and other methods, the World Health Organisation has collated publications describing approaches to setting priorities for health research.

View our other guidance on developing and sharing a research strategy: