Exploring Researchfish

by Rick Hamilton

The first quarter of the new year is a busy time for our grant holders, research organisation staff, and all those involved with the collection of research outcomes in ESRC and UKRI. It sees the start of another Researchfish submission period, and this is the fifth year that our grant holders have taken part. Here in the ESRC Insights team, we have spent the year since the last submission period reviewing the data we have collected so far and reflecting on how we use it.

Lessons learned through failure

by Olivia Maynard

So happy to have been awarded an @ESRC New Investigator Grant looking at what makes good tobacco health warnings for adults & adolescents

— Olivia Maynard (@OliviaMaynard17) September 8, 2017

This is how I chose to tell my colleagues on Twitter that I’d been awarded a prestigious ESRC New Investigator Grant. People congratulated me and ‘liked’ my post – it looked like a fantastic success story. However, I’m sure there were many (particularly other early career researchers) who read my post in dismay –  I certainly remember the feeling of personal failure when others had posted something similar in the past. So, I quickly decided to follow up my initial post to show that every success story has a (often long) back story…

The arc of funding

by Alex Hulkes

We recently published ESRC success rate data and analysis for the seven years up until April 2018 – the first published since we became one of the nine UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) councils. This blog expands on one aspect of it – increases in grant size.

A disciplined approach to disciplines

by Alex Hulkes

If you were to guess what proportion of the ESRC portfolio reflected thinking from, or somehow related to, more than one discipline, what figure would you come up with?

We tried this experiment in ESRC, and came up with a figure of around 60%, but that was based on gut feel. Happily, ‘gut feel’ isn’t the basis for our decision making. Neither are dowsing or entrail reading, and someone has lost the corporate copy of the I Ching.

Very nearly an armful

Alex Hulkes is Strategic Lead for Insights at the ESRC, and is responsible for developing our ability to evaluate and carry out data-informed analysis of ESRC investments, policy and operation.

In his latest blog, he looks at new analysis on the size of ESRC grant submissions and awards.

One of the most common questions we’re asked by potential applicants is ‘how much should I ask for?’ Suppositions and folklore tend to suggest that there is an acceptable upper (and maybe a lower) bound for a funding request: unwritten and culturally derived rather than mandated, and beyond which it is not safe to stray. As Tony Hancock might say, it’s somewhere between a smear and an armful.