mcp-nihr

# @pipeworx/nihr

UK NIHR MCP — every research and training award made by the National Institute for Health and Care Research: who was funded, which programme, how much, where, and which health category. Keyless.

## Tools

- `nihr_search_awards(...)` — keyword search over award titles and abstracts, with filters on programme, funding stream, status, organisation, award amount and start date. Sortable by value or start date.
- `nihr_get_award(project_id)` — one award in full: both abstracts, value, dates, HRCS/UKCRC health coding, organisation with postcode and lat/lon, funding-and-awards link, and every named award holder with ORCID and role.
- `nihr_awards_by_organisation(organisation, ...)` — all NIHR awards to an institution (forgiving substring match), with total funded GBP, mean award, the organisation-name variants that matched, and a per-programme breakdown.
- `nihr_award_holders(...)` — chief investigators and co-applicants by name, ORCID or project id, returning their project ids to pivot into `nihr_get_award`.
- `nihr_awards_by_programme(...)` — award counts, total value, mean size and date range grouped by programme, funding stream, programme type or programme stream. Call with no arguments to discover the real programme names.

## Auth

None. The NIHR Opendatasoft portal is fully open — no key, no signup, no per-key quota.

## Data sources

- Portal: https://nihr.opendatasoft.com/
- Dataset catalogue: `https://nihr.opendatasoft.com/api/explore/v2.1/catalog/datasets?limit=40` (26 datasets)
- Awards (primary, 11,502 rows): `https://nihr.opendatasoft.com/api/explore/v2.1/catalog/datasets/nihr-summary-view/records`
- Award holders (12,644 rows): `https://nihr.opendatasoft.com/api/explore/v2.1/catalog/datasets/award-holders-table/records`
- Public record per award: `https://fundingawards.nihr.ac.uk/award/<project_id>`

Other datasets on the same portal, not yet wired into this pack: `nihr-infrastructure-supported-projects` (45,258), `infonihr-award-hrcs-rac-coding-and-apportionment` (14,301), `infonihr-award-hrcs-coding-and-apportionment` (13,771), `iat-data` (6,275 integrated academic training), `coded-portfolio` (1,964), `phof-datase` (1,585 public health), `nihr-open-data-global-health-downstream-partner-data` (1,528), `schools-data` (1,022), `rare-diseases-research-landscape-project` (787), `womens-health-curated-portfolio` (691), `prp_dataset` (509).

### Gotchas

`project_id` values come in three shapes and one of them contains slashes — `002/0028` alongside `NIHR208893` and `DRF-2009-02-122` — so the id must sit inside a double-quoted ODSQL literal and the whole `where` clause must be URL-encoded (`where=project_id%3d%22002%2f0028%22`); an unquoted or unencoded id silently matches nothing. `limit` hard-caps at 100 and Opendatasoft returns `InvalidRESTParameterError` rather than clamping, so the pack clamps for you. Full-text matching inside a field needs the ODS function form `search(field, "text")`; plain `field="value"` is exact equality, and `field like "value"` is the case-insensitive substring match this pack uses for institution and programme names — necessary because the same institution appears under several contracted names (`Imperial College London`, `Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine` and `IMPERIAL COLLEGE HEALTHCARE NHS TRUST` are three separate values covering 419 awards between them). `award_amount_from_dh` is a genuine number in GBP, so it can be filtered, sorted and summed — but an aggregate `select` with no `group_by` echoes the same totals row once per matched record, so read only the first result. `min()`/`max()` over a date field return full ISO timestamps rather than dates. On a `group_by` query `total_count` is the number of *groups* and is capped by `limit`, so it is not a row count. Some awards have a null `programme_type` (1,055 of them), and `award_holder_name` on the awards dataset can pack two people into one string separated by `/` — the award-holders dataset is the reliable per-person view.

## Quick Start

Add to your MCP client (Claude Desktop, Cursor, Windsurf, etc.):

```json
{
  "mcpServers": {
    "nihr": {
      "url": "https://gateway.pipeworx.io/nihr/mcp"
    }
  }
}
```

Or connect to the full Pipeworx gateway for access to all 1375+ data sources:

```json
{
  "mcpServers": {
    "pipeworx": {
      "url": "https://gateway.pipeworx.io/mcp"
    }
  }
}
```

## Using with ask_pipeworx

Instead of calling tools directly, you can ask questions in plain English:

```
ask_pipeworx({ question: "your question about Nihr data" })
```

The gateway picks the right tool and fills the arguments automatically.

## More

- [All tools and guides](https://github.com/pipeworx-io/examples)
- [pipeworx.io](https://pipeworx.io)

## License

MIT