Stats, Black Eyes and Feathers in Caps

'No sir, a reduction in applications is a definite Feather in
your Cap'

As any research administrator worth their salt will know, The Times Higher published the annual stats for RCUK awards last week. In universities across the land there's fevered analysis, trying to work out (like Colonel Cathcart) whether they represent a Black Eye or a Feather in the Cap - or both, simultaneously.

After all the recent mission group shenanigans, I thought it would be interesting to see how the internecine factions within the Russell Group and 94 Group are performing. For this exercise, I've averaged out the figures for the following four groups:

• RG Old: i.e. the original Russell Group, namely Birmingham, Bristol, Cambridge, Cardiff, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Imperial, KCL, Leeds, Liverpool, LSE, Manchester, Newcastle, Nottingham, Oxford, QUB, Sheffield, Southampton, UCL, Warwick
• RG New: i.e. those that jumped ship from 94 Group and joined the RG in the summer, namely York, Durham, Exeter, QMUL 
• 94 Former: i.e. those that jumped ship from 94 Group but are currently unaligned, Bath, St Andrews, Surrey 
• 94 Current: i.e. Birkbeck, UEA, Essex, Goldsmiths, IoE, RHUL, Lancaster, Loughborough, Reading, SOAS, Sussex.

So, first, let's look at overall award value:

No surprise there: the old, 'big science' universities are getting the lion's share of the funding. What is interesting though, is that those universities that recently left the 94 Group to wander in the wilderness are actually generating more RCUK income than those that were invited into the hallowed portals of the RG earlier in the year.

Next application number:

Once again, no surprise: application numbers are down across the board. This is probably largely due to the Research Councils demanding demand management. They want less applications so their success rates don't look quite so pitiful. Interesting, again, the recent departees are putting in more than the newly anointed RGers. Some would say that the newly anointed are showing their quality: less is more. Others might say they are lazy laggards. I couldn't possibly comment.

Next, award number:

Once again, the Russell Group reign supreme, getting almost double the number of awards as their new intake. There had better be some sock pulling amongst those whipper-snappers. Moreover, RG are getting, on average, four times as many as the remaining 94 Group.

Finally, success rate:

A tight cluster here, around the late twenties/early thirties, but interestingly the wandering homeless outdo the folk on the hill (both old and new money).

So what to make of all this? I'll leave that to my fellow research administrators to decide on black eyes/feathers in their caps, and ultimately stats can be twisted to mean whatever you want them to mean (a nice blog post on this from Cash4Questions, here), but I hope it provides a pause for thought and a rethink about how we see ourselves.

Stat-tastic

The ARMA Conference 2012 kicked off with a two-headed plenary from Andrew Plume (Elsevier) and Sharmila Nebhrajani (AMRC). It was an odd combination: Plume gave us an overview of 'brain circulation' – that's the brain drain in old money – and Nebhrajani banged the drum for the value of the medical research charities' professional association. What did they have in common? Hmm. Availability seemed to be the uniting factor. That and an evangelical love of statistics.

Plume started by dispelling some myths. Rather than being a negative, the movement of talent brings enormous benefit. Not only do those who leave the UK usually return with additional skills, knowledge and experience, but the country also benefits from the 'inflow' of talent. Those coming are, according to Elsevier, more productive. Plume floated his proposition on a raft of numbers. The UK has the lowest number of 'stay at home' researchers: only 37% of British academics don't, at some stage in their career, move abroad, compared with 55% of Americans and 75% of Chinese academics. Elsewhere he produced graphs which showed the number of publications involving overseas partners. The UK has the largest proportion, but interestingly the EU27 graph looks very similar to the USA's, which might suggest that continent-wide collaboration makes it unnecessary to look further afield.

He then handed over to Nebhrajani, who executed a nifty hand brake turn to take the delegates in a completely different direction. The Association of Medical Research Charities (AMRC) is an umbrella organisation that represents a huge variety of funders, including the behemoth that is Wellcome on one end of the spectrum to the likes of the CGD Society on the other. All have to have rigorous peer review of funding applications if they want to be a member, and some 94% of charitable giving to medical research in the UK is to an AMRC member. The benefits of membership are that AMRC can act as a 'kitemark' to reassure the public that they're the real McCoy, and not some fly by night outfit, but it also allows the members to access some Dept of Health support.

Nebhrajani did raise a couple of more general points. Firstly, she made the point the the research community has to start thinking now about how to justify the 'ringfence' that the government provided in the last Comprehensive Spending Review (CSR) in readiness for the next one  in a couple of years' time.  Secondly, she noted that charitable funding is beginning to fall: it fell by 1% in 2011-12 after rises of between 5-20% in the preceding four years. She finished by admitting that she was 'very worried' about cuts to NHS research funding, and the new landscape in which GPs would hold the purse strings. Not only did none of these locally-based commissioning groups currently talk about research, but in England and Wales the NHS was hamstrung by bureaucratic approval processes, meaning that projects took four times as long to get the nod than they did in Scotland or Germany.