‘Tis the Season: For Annual Reporting of Data
As many approach or have just closed a fiscal year, thoughts are now turning towards annual reporting of data. ‘Tis the season for research administrators to measure, count, and identify new paths! This may occur across higher education institutions, industry, and private research bodies. In terms of research administration, data is a key driver of information about financial health, supports financial planning and forecasting, and can be key to determining volume of work as well as human resource planning. By using data to create a clearer picture, forecasting around system upgrades and infrastructure needs, personnel management and growth or contraction can be better predicted.
It is best to know what data you would like to see, when planning or implementing management tools like lifecycle software. That will support more regular reporting, allowing for more timely use of data to pivot during the year and reduce time-consuming manual work to produce these reports. It is key to think about the metrics that might be helpful to support data-driven decision making.
- Research Development: key metrics might include the number of outreach activities; measuring any new practice introduced; working groups organized;, limited grant submission processes; and internal grants programs metrics.
- Pre-Award and Research Development: key metrics might include grant inquiries; number and dollar amount of grant submissions; diversity of sponsors; applications by type, category, school or system; number of applications at a professional level of applicants; and indirect recovery rate applied for.
- Post-Award: key metrics might include awards won by dollar amount; indirect recovery rate; awards won by school, system, department and level of primary investigator; duration of award; and key areas that have higher dollar awards.
- Other items might include IRB, IBC, and IACUC number of applications; number of protocol reviews and levels of reviews; number of non-compliance items identified;, PAM (Post-Approval Monitoring) – See TABLE below. Responsible Conduct of Research (RCR) training number of attendees; and Conflict of Commitment and Interest documentation may be included along with key grants related to specific themes, strategic priorities, or of specific media interest.
- Compliance: It is also critical to think about the patterns you might be seeing and what you want to change. Are you considering a trajectory of change over time, perhaps looking back three to five years, in order to understand whether you are seeing growth or contraction? Reflect on what might be driving those changes. It could be helpful to review that data consistently over time. Keep in mind that the value of money changes over time, so if you go back more than three years, you may need to account for that.
As decision-making around investment in research infrastructure, headcount, and systems, is continuing to shift towards using data to drive decision-making, it is critical that research administration provides robust, timely, and regular reporting of key metrics to support investment, and continued support.
Authored by Dr. Saiqa Anne Qureshi, Adjunct Professor
Johns Hopkins University
Authored by Dr. Rani Muthkrishnan, Director of Research Compliance
Texas A&M University San Antonio
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#October2024