Fiscal year 2016 officially closed out on September 30. Now that we are past our panels in October and early November, we have a chance to look back and report on the DEB Core Program merit review and funding outcomes for FY 2016.
This post follows the format we’ve used in previous years. For a refresher, and lengthier discussions of the hows and whys of the metrics, you can visit the 2015, 2014, and 2013 numbers.
Read on to see how 2016 compares. Continue reading
Fiscal year 2015 has come to a close. With the dust settled, we can crunch the numbers on the DEB Core Program merit review and funding outcomes.
This post follows the format we’ve used in previous years. For a refresher, and lengthier discussions of the hows and whys of the metrics, you can visit the 2014 and 2013 numbers.
Read on to see how 2015 compares.
For any demographic analysis or comparison, NSF is reliant on the self-reported characteristics of participants in all phases of proposals and awards. Completion of the profiles is voluntary but critical for linking demographic data to proposal, funding, and review patterns. And, importantly, your profile provides the contact information that we use to reach out to you. So if your email address and institutional information are not up to date you may miss out on funding opportunities or critical notifications that affect your eligibility for funding.
So, is your FastLane PI profile complete, up to date, and error-free?
What about your OTHER FastLane profile? When was the last time you completed your Reviewer information? Continue reading
Our friends at Dynamic Ecology posted a little while back about the NSF-wide trends in per-person success rate based on this 2014 report to the National Science Board that provided merit review process statistics across the whole agency[i]. There were several questions in the comments to that post regarding the context for the numbers and how they would look for DEB or IOS, especially since preliminary proposals were explicitly excluded from the calculations in the report to the NSB[ii].
So, we’ve put something together with DEB data to follow-up on that discussion. Our analysis sticks to the general approach of the NSF-wide report with modifications to allow inclusion of preliminary proposal data. Continue reading
At the end of 2013, we presented DEB submission and award portfolio data examining the initial results of the preliminary proposal process, leading to DEB’s FY2013 awards. In this post, we provide a follow-up for the second round of awards funded under the preliminary proposal system in FY2014. Continue reading
You may recall that way back in the first half of 2013 we invited the community by email and also via this blog to participate in a survey to gauge satisfaction with the preliminary proposal process in DEB and IOS.
The full results of the survey have now been published in BioScience. Our thanks to you for responding to our call to participate in great numbers and to the various discussants, readers, and reviewers who helped throughout the process. Continue reading
This is a quick numbers post while we in DEB pivot from summer research and meeting outreach to fiscal closeout and autumn (full proposal) panel mode.
CAREER proposals in BIO were due on July 21, 2014. These proposals will be reviewed this fall and become part of the FY 2015 decision-making process. In this post, we take a look at the trends in submission of CAREER proposals through the current competition. We aren’t looking at funding rates or outcomes – those are beyond the scope of today’s post.
This post is a continuation of a discussion of the early data on the performance of Beginning Investigators and Primarily Undergraduate Institutions. Please read Part 1 before continuing for background and explanation of the terms used. If you are new to DEB Numbers posts, I suggest you read our introductory message to familiarize yourself with some of the conventions we use here to describe what can be confusing information.
Just before the end of December 2012, the Division of Environmental Biology sent out an email message to a list of all people listed as PIs and Co-PIs on DEB proposals since the start of fiscal year 2008. (Aside: if you did not get the email and think you should have, make sure your FastLane profile information is up to date.) This message included a notice of our plans to start blogging among other efforts to enhance interactions between DEB and the research communities. About 1/3 of the message consisted of several snippets of Division-wide data from the two-stage proposal process with specific tables focused on two groups: Early Career Investigators and Primarily Undergraduate Institutions (PUIs). We received helpful feedback from several readers of the original email pointing out ways in which the presentation could have been clearer. We thank you for that. It is already helping to make this blog better.
Since many out there may not have seen the original message, and others may have been intrigued to learn more, this post re-visits and expands on those numbers.
The data snippets in the email were meant to begin a discussion, they were not intended to be comprehensive or the final word. There are other ways to look at the numbers and significant context and nuance simply could not be crammed in to a reasonable email. Actual performance numbers from the two-stage review process are just starting to come in and even those will change somewhat as Program Officers pursue every opportunity to secure funding through the fiscal year’s end.
DEBrief 