Fundermentals Top 5 2020

2020: Another year 'we'd all rather forget'
Photo by ANIRUDH on Unsplash

Last year I started my annual round up of the most popular posts on Fundermentals with the words 'it's been quite a year. One, I think, that we'd all rather forget.'

After 2020, the previous year feels positively halcyon. The pandemic has changed everything, and we've all had to adjust to a new way of working, living and relaxing. As we start 2021 even the idea of going to an office or a cafe feels positively exotic. 

Given the changes we've had to adapt to, I've had less opportunity to post frequently, so this year's round up is more svelte, limiting itself to the top five. Still, it's not about the quantity but the quality, and 2020 saw some of the finest, well-crafted and frankly world-changing articles. So sit back, try not to think about the world outside, and enjoy looking back at another year 'we'd all rather forget.' 

The Funnel of Love

 Funnelling grant success
(photo: Sergio Mena Ferreira on Unsplash)

Although larger universities get the majority of research funding, their success rates are no better than that of smaller ones. What makes the difference is the culture and expectations at each.

Conversion Conversations

Alchemy: like getting a research grant,
only easier (image: Wellcome CC BY)

Last week Alex Hulkes, the Economic and Social Research Council’s strategic lead for the insights team, wrote an interesting report on the council’s conversion rate for grants. This is the percentage of fundable grants that it is able to fund. In November he provided a similar analysis of success rates. Taken together, the two reports suggest that while the quality of applications has increased (the proportion of ‘fundable’ applications has risen from roughly one-quarter to half of the total), the success rate is pretty much where it was five years ago.

In Search of the Royal Society Success Rates

Somewhere behind the Palladian grandeur success rates lurk. Possibly (image: Steve Slater, CC BY 2.0).

One of my roles at the University of Kent is secretary to the Research and Innovation Board, which decides on policy and strategy. I’m not a natural bureaucrat, but the paper shuffling, agenda setting and minute writing are compensated for somewhat by the ringside seat I get for the discussions that decide the institutional direction on research and innovation. 

At the most recent meeting, the board looked at success rates for different funders. In readiness for this we had gathered data on how the university compared with funder averages. For the research councils, this was fairly straightforward. Success rates are produced annually for each of the seven councils, via Times Higher. You can see last year’s figures here.

Success rates for the Leverhulme Trust take a little more digging, but the figures can be found in its annual reports. The Wellcome Trust gives more global figures but does provide a comprehensive analysis by gender and age profile, disciplinary distribution and award rate over time. And the British Academy offers all of its figures when its officers give presentations, such as on these slides given to King’s College London.

So it came as a surprise when I could find nothing on the Royal Society’s website about its success rates.

RCUK Decent Success Rate Shock!

'100% you say? Well I'm sure
I could make my Chaucer
project fit  'Environmental Change''

Now here's a good news story that the Research Councils have been remarkably slow to crow about: success rates for most are looking surprisingly healthy. Looking at the latest published stats (RCUK has gathered links to them all here, including a broken AHRC one. *sigh* Best go direct, here), they give a lie to the current feeling that RCUK success rates have fallen so low that you may as well buy a ticket to EuroMillions. The  success rates for the five councils that have produced them for 2011-12 range from 21-41%, and average a healthy 31%.

Of course, there are a number of factors which have buoyed the figures:

• firstly, some Councils have either introduced, or are strongly encouraging, some form of demand management. This is almost certainly the reason for EPSRC's 41% success rate.
• secondly, other success rates are skewed by 100% success rates for some managed programmes, such as the 6 out of 6 that the AHRC's Researching Environment Change Follow Up scheme garnered. This helped the AHRC achieve an eye popping 40% success rate last year.
• finally, many have seen application numbers drop, not necessarily because of demand management, but perhaps because applicants have become demoralised by rejection, or their attention has been diverted elsewhere, such as on the REF, or teaching , or (perish the thought!) impact activities.

I've collated the figures I can find, and the full table of application numbers and success rates can be found (for Kent staff only, I'm afraid) on our SharePoint site.

ERC Inundated by Applications for Synergy Grants

Interesting statistics have emerged from the European Research Council regarding the number of applications to the pilot round of the Synergy grants scheme. You will, of course, remember that this was launched in July to encourage academics to group together to be more than the sum of their parts. Like the Beatles. I mean, aside from the Frog Chorus, has Paul McCartney ever done anything that touches his work with John Lennon?

Anyway, as it was a pilot, they were only planning to fund 10 or so grants. However, they obviously touched a raw nerve of need amongst the European research community, because by close of play on 25 January they had received 710 applications. Now I'm no mathematician, but I make that to be a success rate of 1.41%. Eeek!

This brings back the heady days of the first round of the Starting Grants in 2007, when 9167 applicants applied for one of the 299 awards on offer. But even that offered a comparatively respectable 3.26% success rate - more than double the possible outcome for the Synergy Grants.

I'd love to know what's going through the mind of the ERC President Prof Helga Nowotny (whose surname, incidentally, looks a little like a mashup between the acronyms for the News of the World and Have I Got News for You). Panic? Fear? Or pleasure that, once again, the ERC has identified they type of funding that European researchers actually want: responsive mode, and generous.

I hope so. I hope that this experience does not deter the ERC from ever running the scheme again. Rather, I hope they bite the bullet and provide more funding for the scheme. There's obviously a pan-European appetite for such funding. Let's hope they're brave, recognise the demand, and provide the funding to at least push the success rate into double figures.

MRC 'Neither Up Nor Down' Shock

Oh you couldn't make it up. Paul 'Shriek' Jump made it a hattrick in last week's Times Higher by bemoaning the fact that the MRC success rate had - wait for it - stayed the same.

To recap:

• On 1 September Jump suggested that the fall in its success rate reflected badly on the ESRC...
• whereas on 8 September Jump suggested that the rise in its success rate reflected badly on the EPSRC;

Now, with its success rate pretty much static (it actually fell by 1%), Jump was wringing his hands about how badly this reflected on the MRC.

Spookily, in a comment on this blog Adam Golberg had foreseen this scenario almost exactly: 'Next week in the Times Higher: The XRC Research Council announces unchanged success rates. Does this stagnation spell the beginning of the end for the XRC?'

Does he know something we don't? Does he have access to lines of communication which are - frankly - supernatural? Is he, in fact, Robert Johnson?

We should be told.

EPSRC Success Rate Rises to 36%

Paul 'shriek' Jump is once again questioning the Research Councils in the Times Higher. After his 'off with their heads' piece last week on the ESRC, he turns his ire on the EPSRC this week and questions its steadily rising success rate. From a low of 26% in 2008-09, the Council's success rate has risen to 36% in 2010-11.

Good news, you would think. EPSRC put it down to the success of their blacklisting policy (although they don't call it that: to them it will forever be the 'Policy for Repeatedly Unsuccessful Applicants'). This limits those who have had three or more rejections, or have been in the bottom half of the prioritisation list, in a two year period and have a personal success rate of less than 25%, to only submitting one application in the subsequent year. With me so far?

However, Jump quotes two academics who suggest that the success of the policy is debatable: Ian Walmsley suggested that applications are down across the research councils (although this seems to run counter to Jump's piece on the ESRC), and David Price claimed that the policy was deterring weak and strong applications alike.

Whilst it's clear that Jump is a glass-half-empty kind of a guy, I agree that EPSRC's news should be greeted with caution. The Council has recently been in the headlines about it's - ahem - 'consultation', which suggested cutting funding to a number of disciplines within its remit. This has been met by horror in the sector, and has left David 'Derek Smalls' Delpy crying into his beer and saying that it wasn't really a consultation anyway.

Cutting both the number of disciplines and the number of eligible individuals within the remaining disciplines will, eventually, lead to a success rate of 100% for the Council. Hurray! Their work will be complete. Or certainly will be until this plummets back to 0% as there'll be no-one eligible left to apply.

'Churn Becomes the More Effective Strategy'?

There's been some problem with Blogger last week, and it seems to have lost the post I did on whether to deluge funders with applications when success rates plummet. Luckily, I kept a draft, and have pasted it below. Apologies if you've seen this already.
_________________

An interesting piece by former Times Higher journalist Zoe Corbyn writing in Nature. She reports on a mathematical analysis that suggests that, when success rates for grant applications fall below 15%, applicants should just deluge the funders rather than try to hone their proposals. It's quantity that counts.

You can imagine the funders reacting with horror to this suggestion. All their recent policy diktats have been aimed at discouraging just this kind of behaviour. 'Demand management', to give it its newspeak label, is the policy du jour with the Research Councils, who are seeking to stem the flow of applications and thereby bolster plummeting success rates.

However, the research seems to suggest that more is better. The analysis was undertaken by Paul Roebber, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, together with meteorologist David Schultz from the University of Manchester. It used 'game theory' to model the funding success of two hypothetical groups of 500 scientists whose proposals had the same range in quality but who had different strategies for submitting applications.

And this, I think, is the weakness of the analysis. It's all a bit too...theoretical. Whilst they tried to factor in the idosyncracies of the reviewers (identified as 'correct', 'selfish' or 'harried'), they don't seem to factor in the patchwork of issues, politics, funder priorities and personalities that affect the peer review panels. One factor that doesn't seem to have been included is the irritation of the panelists at seeing repeat submissions - even if the funder allows for resubmissions. Whilst interesting, I think we need to see beyond the theoretical mathematics and develop a more nuanced understanding of what works - and what doesn't - when success rates crash.

RCUK Success Rates & Demand Management

Interesting piece in the Times Higher this week. The success rate for EPSRC has gone up, from 26% to 30%, whilst many of its sister Councils have seen rates decrease. No surprise there, but it will act as a spur to the others to introduce some form of demand management, as Adrian Alsop of the ESRC suggested in his talk to us in October. He said that the ESRC was considering a range of options, including barring individual serial low achievers,spreading best practice, introducing institutional quotas, or demanding financial deposits.
The case for formalising internal peer review is getting stronger and stronger, a fact recognised by the Directors of Research at their recent Network meeting. However, any system should be supportive, non-bureaucratic and relatively quick. Otherwise it will act as a disincentive, and may put people off from even considering applying. As Oxford's PVC noted in the Times Higher article, 'it is a bit demoralising when you see your proposal has only a 10 per cent chance of success, but it is worse if you exclude ideas from being aired and evaluated.'
Do read the article in full if you get the chance. In the meantime here are the Research Councils' current success rates:

Talking of Marie Curie...

I attended an interesting session on the Marie Curie Fellowships last week at the UKRO Conference. It was interesting to get some insights into how the UK's done with these. Here are some stats, with the overall success rates for all countries first, and then the success rates for the projects that involve the UK second:

• Initial Training Networks (ITNs): Overall: 7%; UK: 16%
  
• Intra-European Fellowships (IEFs): Overall: 24%; UK: 30%
  
• European Reintegration Grants (ERGs): Overall: 65% (!); UK: 57%
  
• International Reintegration Grants (IRGs): 67% (!!); 78% (!!!)
  
• Industry-Academia Partnerships & Pathways (IAPPs): Overall: 16%; UK: 20%
  
• International Outgoing Fellowships (IOFs): Overall: 20%; UK: 29%
  
• International Research Staff Exchange Scheme (IRSES): Overall: 65%; UK: 66%
  
• International Incoming Fellowships (IIFs): Overall: 15%; UK: 18%
  
• Co-Funding of Regional, National & International Programmes (COFUND): Overall: 66%; UK: 100% (though that was one application out of one).

One other interesting stat (and apologies for sounding like I'm obsessed with numbers here): for the Intra-European Fellowships, which fund movement between member states within the EU, the UK hosts 37% of all fellows, and yet sends out only 4%. Is this down to the UK being a world class centre for academic research, or just down to our poor language skills? I'll let you decide...

The Low Down on the Britac Grants Panel

I've just heard that the success rate for the last round of the British Academy Small Grants was 35%. Eek! A couple of years ago this was a far more robust 69%. So it's halved in two years. I'm not sure if that's down to less money sloshing around 10 Carlton House Terrace (it's not cheap polishing all that marble, you know), or a sign that the whole landscape is just a lot more competitive.
No better time, then, to remind ourselves of what your application will be up against. As you know, the BA represents the whole range of Humanties and Social Sciences. As such, the panel of great and good that will assess your application are quite a mixed bunch.

• Professor Sir Adam Roberts - President - (Oxford) professor of international relations


• Professor Leslie Hill - (Warwick) professor of French


• Professor Maxine Berg - (Warwick) historian


• Professor Doreen Massey - (Open) geographer


• Professor Simon Blackburn - Chairman - (Cambridge) philosopher


• Professor Steven Mithen - (Reading) archaeologist


• Professor Christopher Bliss - (Oxford) economist


• Professor Andrew Whiten - (St Andrews) psychologist

So watch out all you lawyers, anthropolgists, sociologists! All you professors of English, German, Spanish! All you theologians! There'll be no-one batting on your side. But then again, there'll be no internecine spats either...

ERC Success Rates

UKRO has published some information on success rates for the ERC Advanced Grants.

UKRO understands that the overall success rate for the second call, ERC-2009-AdG, was around 15%. This compares to an overall success rate of 12.6% for the first Call, ERC-2008-AdG (although the success rate for grants hosted in the UK success rate was about 20% for that call). UKRO understands that the ERC hope to fund around 230 proposals for the current call.

For the last call, the ERC has done some analysis of who got what. In terms of Host Institution, of the 200 ‘main list’ grants awarded, the UK had most grants with 52 (26% of the 200 grants, which compares to 21% of grants in the ERC-2008-AdG call). The other countries hosting grants were: Switzerland (27); France (26); Germany (25); the Netherlands (15); Italy (14); Sweden (10); Israel (9); Spain (8); Austria, Denmark and Norway (3 each); Belgium, Finland, Hungary, Ireland and Poland (1 each).In terms of PI nationality, of the 200 ‘main list’ grants, the most successful country is the UK with 48 PIs being of British nationality (equating to 24% of the 200 PIs having British nationality, which compares to 17% for the ERC-2008-AdG Call). Other PIs are nationals of: Germany and France (26 each); Italy (21); the Netherlands (17); Israel (10); Sweden (9); Switzerland and Spain (8 each); Austria, Denmark and Greece (4 each); Belgium (3); the USA (2); Cyprus, Finland, Croatia, Hungary, Ireland, Luxembourg, Norway, Poland, Romania and South Africa (1 each).

More information available in the UKRO article here.

A Good Alternative Fellowship

People often ask for fellowship funding, and you can understand why. It allows academics to take time out from routine administrative and teaching duties to concentrate on research, which is often what they went into academia for in the first place.

Unfortunately, most other academics are seeking the same thing, and as a result success rates for fellowships tend to be the lowest of any kind of research funding, averaging between 5-15%. However, the Leverhulme 'Study Abroad' Fellowship bucks this trend. The success rate for these last year was a healthy 31%. They offer up to £22,000 to cover 'reasonable replacement cover whilst the Fellow is overseas; travel to and within the overseas country or countries; a maintenance grant to meet the increased expense of living overseas; and essential research costs.'

So if your research takes you abroad, think about these as an 'alternative' type of fellowship. But be warned: the deadline's fast approaching on 10 November.

Get with the Programme

In the past I've always steered people away from the glitzy 'research programmes' issued by the funders. You know the kind of thing: 'ESRC/AHRC issue a £10m Programme of Cross Council Research to End World Poverty', or some such.
My reason for doing so is that they inevitably attract everyone who specialises in that area (so competition is fierce), but the resources available are limited. As a result success rates are usually pitiful.
However, looking at the AHRC's recent 2008-09 Annual Report the succes rates for different schemes makes startling reading:

• Responsive Mode success rates ranged between 10-33%
• Strategic Mode (i.e. Programmes) ranged between 6-100%

6% I can understand, but 100%?? Surely some mistake?? But no, the overall average success rate for the programme grants is a very respectable 41%; for responsive mode a risible 18%. So the message to take away is never to dismiss Programme grants out of hand: if your project is strong, your subject appropriate and your application clear and well-written, then your chances are as good (if not better) than for standard grants. More detail on the success rates in 2008-09 are available on p79 of the Annual Report.

UK Success in FP7

The UK received the largest proportion of European Commission Framework funding in 2008, according to the EC's Second FP7 Monitoring Report, published by UKRO. It overtook Germany to receive 16% (or €568m) of the 7th Framework Programme (FP7) total annual budget of €3,534m. The UK’s success rate also increased from 21.8% in 2007 to 26.3% in 2008 and continues to be higher than the EU average of 21.4%.

Marie Curie: Applications Up 40%

Away from RCUK, other funders are feeling the pressure of increased applications. The European Commission's Marie Curie individual fellowships, which closed on 18 Aug, have received 40% more applications. UKRO are reporting that success rates are likely to tumble.

'The only thing we have to fear is fear itself'

The Times Higher recently analysed Research Council success rates, and the news was not good. For the first time success rates have fallen to 23%, with the AHRC and ESRC bottom of the pile at 19%.
It’s easy to be dispirited by this. However, success rates only tell a partial story. If your research is good, your case compelling, and your application well framed it is much more likely that you will be funded.
This is shown by some big wins from the very Councils holding up the bottom of the success rate league:

• Jeremy Carrette (Secl—Religious Studies) has just been awarded £450,000 (TBC) from the AHRC for a project on Religious Non-Governmental Organizations and the United Nations in New York and Geneva;
• Caroline Rooney (English) and Anne Hammerstad (PolIR) got 2 of only 14 fellowships made by the ESRC in their ’Global Uncertainties’ Programme. Caroline’s award was £274k, and Anna’s was £162k. Programmes are notoriously hard to succeed in, so this is a great achievement.

And it’s not just good news at RCUK. Jim Mansell (Tizard) and Ann Netten (PSSRU) are part of a successful consortium that established a £15m School for Social Care Research (SSCR). Jim and Ann are due to receive £1.1m each from the NHS for their part in the SSCR.

So be brave: Research Services are ready to help with your applications to ensure that they stand every chance of bucking the success rates.