Research tools
Suggested mindset while researching. The guide contains a wide array of search engines and search methods and none of these should be considered as exhaustive. This can sometimes be due to incomplete reporting. In addition, every search engine and search method will produce different results for different campuses, naturally. Therefore, what will work for one school may not necessarily work for another. This is why cross-university collaboration is also crucial! Furthermore, every searching method will have to be modified and you will have try out different variants. More on this will be explained below.
General Search engines For Federal Grants
Find the A-133 or O.M.B. Audit reports of your institution. Every institution is required to produce such documents and therefore a cursory search should yield some results. Look through the pass-through programs from N.A.S.A., D.o.D. and the D.o.E.. There are a few other agencies as well to generally look through but this should be enough to get you started.
Federal Procurement Data System [F.P.D.S.] contains official government data on contracts: [-]
USA Spending should sync with F.P.D.S. on a nightly basis: [-]
HigherGov is a 3rd party analogue of USA Spending. If it is paywalled use a VPN. We recommend Mullvad VPN [-]
Tech Inquiry is a search engine that scrapes data from USA Spending but also F.E.C. political funding. It is a great resource but should not be considered exhaustive despite the fact that it does scrape: [-]. You can also download and modify Jack Poulson’s scraper to your own desired needs: [-]
To find grant solicitations before awarding use these two links: [-] and [-]
Defense Technical Information Center is a branch of the Pentagon that evaluates scientific studies for potential military use: [-]
For foreign gifts and contracts, Section 117 Foreign Gift and Contract Reporting of the Higher Education Act of 1965 requires that universities report foreign funding of over $250k: [-]
You can also search for the defense contract news feed by googling as an input query: site:defense.gov/News/Contracts/
Technical details of project are contained here on the Broad Agency Announcement page: [-]
General O.S.I.N.T.
General O.S.I.N.T. search engines on GitHub [-]
Further general O.S.I.N.T.: [-]
InstaHunt for searching social media feeds: [-]
Use web scrapers like BeautifulSoup and Selenium.
Freedom of information act requests
Find the grant/contract you want to investigate on USA Spending or FPDS, and identify its procurement instrument identifier (P.I.I.D.) number.
Go to foia.gov and start a request: “Start a request with a specific agency” → D.o.D. (or other dept) → component (ex. Air Force)
Tips:
Latency on D.o.D. contracts is about a year so make sure you do them early once you find contracts.
They’ll try and shake you off. You may get emails asking if you’re still interested in it, etc, having to opt back in to receive the F.O.I.A. – Do so.
Stuff you can ask about: Statements of work, contract document, related emails, F.O.I.A.s
(who else has requested info) → you can’t F.O.I.A. fully private emails
Example F.O.I.A. request: Pursuant to the Freedom of Information Act, I hereby request the following records: A copy of the contract – including any modifications and statements of work – between [ENTITY #1] and [ENTITY #2] with PIID [NUMBER]. I am also requesting copies of all emails between [ENTITY #1] and [ENTITY #2] relating to this award.
Further tips and tricks
Look through professor’s C.V.’s
Look through LinkedIn pages
Look up grant numbers you find and often times the studies funded by a particular grant will come up.
Learn how to use advanced searching methods: [-]