"A study of federally funded research projects in the United States estimated that principal investigators spend on average about 45% of their time on administrative activities related to applying for and managing projects rather than conducting active research" www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... - ThreadSky

dpmoriarity.bsky.social • 53 days ago

"A study of federally funded research projects in the United States estimated that principal investigators spend on average about 45% of their time on administrative activities related to applying for and managing projects rather than conducting active research"

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2407644121

Comments

aemonten.bsky.social•52 days ago

https://bsky.app/profile/aemonten.bsky.social/post/3leremmmdmc2s

jrgant.bsky.social•37 days ago

📌

liladavachi.bsky.social•52 days ago

Yes 💯

cjsewall9.bsky.social•53 days ago

I would say this was the primary reason I left academia. I (naively) thought that getting a grant would allow me to spend less time writing grants. But then I quickly realized that a primary function of grants is that it buys you time to write more grants 🫠

tuomaspernu.bsky.social•53 days ago

Indeed. The current situation is simply mad.

https://bsky.app/profile/tuomaspernu.bsky.social/post/3lewk7237xc2w

sterlingwright.bsky.social•52 days ago

Here is an area where A.I. task supporters will be able to help.

dpmoriarity.bsky.social•52 days ago

Curious to hear more specifics. Given that grants are typically to discover new things, would seem to me that writing the idea generation and methodology would be particularly poorly suited for LLMs given they are trained on what already exists

comptonscatter.bsky.social•51 days ago

it seems a lot of people want to use LLMs like autocraption for videos, where something generates a template they can edit rather than writing from scratch.

Me, I'd be too terrified of missing something Stupidly Generated and end up spending more time editing than if I'd just written it fresh

greyson.bsky.social•40 days ago

How?

morgado.bsky.social•51 days ago

📌

dwightsfisher.bsky.social•52 days ago

This has been true for decades. I discussed this with my fellow researchers at least 30 years ago. We were successful in acquiring grant funding for survival. The time of reviewers is generally not counted at all. Grants give the illusion that money is directed efficiently to a specific topic.

brooklynkid53bskys.bsky.social•53 days ago

maybe I am missing something, but your quote seems to be very misleading, compared with the next sentence in the article

dpmoriarity.bsky.social•53 days ago

Would have to read those articles tomorrow to say for sure, but the first references PIs of federally funded studies (I. E., people who are doing work that involves grants) whereas academics is a much broader term that may involve faculty who don't typically work in grants funded fields

spinespresso.bsky.social•52 days ago

Some excerpts may ring true at a certaingut level but with Ioannidis as an author can the data or conclusions be trusted?

iamworshipper.bsky.social•52 days ago

The constant grant grind is why I left academia.

There's so much "bad" science being done because it could get funded when potentially great science is neglected.

profbobhowarth.bsky.social•52 days ago

45% sounds about right in my experience. It is a terribly inefficient system, slowing the progress of research.

jorsmo.bsky.social•53 days ago

Tracks

tuomaspernu.bsky.social•53 days ago

"An evaluation of Europe’s Horizon 2020 programs found that between 30 and 50% of the funding is spent on grant writing".

"ERC’s funding decisions showed a bias against applicants with histories of high-risk research, favoring those with more conventional profiles".

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2407644121

ddmcd.bsky.social•52 days ago

I help write proposals and agree that the amount of purely administrative work involved in proposal development is at times bone crushing, but I also see that proposal development is an opportunity to plan and be creative about “next steps,” which I find difficult to argue with.

tuomaspernu.bsky.social•52 days ago

Oh, putting together proposals/research plans is not 100% negative undertaking, of course! I just forced my PhD student to write a research plan in order for her to get a better picture of what's ahead of her (even though there is no need to apply for funds). Definitely useful.

afdezanta.bsky.social•52 days ago

“the losers face potentially big decisions such as changing their research plans, relocating or even deciding to quit research”

afdezanta.bsky.social•52 days ago

“the immense pressure to win funding can negatively impact researchers’ mental health and work-life balance”

tuomaspernu.bsky.social•52 days ago

This is one of the reasons I have advocated lottery. People are now aiming at illusory targets, and "failures" carry significant psychological and practical consequences. Lottery is not a magic bullet, but it would relieve us of a lot of unjustified pressure.

https://bsky.app/profile/tuomaspernu.bsky.social/post/3leylbsuzv22c

ladybugfi.bsky.social•49 days ago

That’s a bold claim since the Horizon grants I’m aware of are in the order of several millions for 3-4 year projects.

tuomaspernu.bsky.social•49 days ago

That's looking at what the scheme in total has funded (not the individual grants), compared to the total resources (not the individual applicant's who got lucky) allocated to preparing applications.

https://www.eua.eu/publications/briefings/efsi-and-horizon-2020-efficiency-and-opportunity-cost.html

ladybugfi.bsky.social•49 days ago

Ah, ok, makes sense now.

tuomaspernu.bsky.social•49 days ago

Yea, and of course one could criticise that calculation in many ways (e.g. I wonder if 50k eur per proposal is realistic). However, at the same time, this does not seem to account for the costs of whole system & procedure.

ladybugfi.bsky.social•49 days ago

I know something of the evaluation process and it has its problems but nowadays they do a lot of the consensus meetings online so from the EU point of view it's not as costly as it used to be. From the applicant POV still the same.

leia4u.bsky.social•52 days ago

📌

susannanakin.bsky.social•52 days ago

📌

tkaiser.science•53 days ago

@amreibahr.bsky.social 🥹

marxistpsych.bsky.social•53 days ago

I ask myself if I weren't to do this research project, is someone else going to do something like it? The answer is almost always yes. That's why I increasingly think about removing myself from the funded research workforce to focus on clinical/conceptual work. What am I adding besides competition?

ahoodedstranger.bsky.social•52 days ago

My adviser back in the day certainly didn't spend much of his time advising. But he did get the grant to fund me.

reasonpolicy.bsky.social•52 days ago

Yikes!!

byrdnick.com•52 days ago

For those looking for the primary source of the studies about — among other things — the 44.3% admin. burden of externally funded research: https://thefdp.org/demonstrations-resources/faculty-workload-survey
- reports & slide decks
- data from 2005, 2012, 2018

(These data show *many* more results — more valuable than the PNAS paper, IMO.)

dpmoriarity.bsky.social•52 days ago

Thanks for sharing this! 📌

byrdnick.com•52 days ago

Thanks be to Sandra Schneider for doing and reporting this research!

I didn't find a corresponding Bsky or gScholar profile, but @researchgate.bsky.social has a followable profile for Dr. Schneider: https://www.researchgate.net/scientific-contributions/Sandra-L-Schneider-2103179450

vnoel.bsky.social•51 days ago

This will join all the previous articles with a similar message, that I all agree with, but unfortunately have no effect

jdcrawford.bsky.social•52 days ago

When a PI says 'I will devote 20 hours / week to this project' it really means half that time on supervising staff & trainees on design, set-up, experiments, analysis, writing, presentations; and half on protocols, contracts, purchase orders, reimbursements, evaluations, reports, communications...

mikethemadbiol.bsky.social•52 days ago

📌

jayvanbavel.bsky.social•53 days ago

Such a Colossal waste

cdelawalla.bsky.social•52 days ago

Going viral for a good cause, I see 😂

nuts4granite.bsky.social•31 days ago

In some groups it’s more like 99%

leia4u.bsky.social•52 days ago

📌

sherryhamby.bsky.social•53 days ago

Very sad, but I think we need to ask who benefits from this system. Seems to me that it supports a lot of the status quo and keeps a lot of smart people from being as socially impactful as they might be otherwise.

gwollman.bsky.social•53 days ago

A lot of people are employed as grant writers, grant administrators, grant auditors, and so on. And the legislature gets fed a story about "efficiency" and a "race to the top" and the "most deserving" proposals. I blame William Proxmire.

sandrinehalfen.bsky.social•52 days ago

📌

susannanakin.bsky.social•52 days ago

📌

jerichardson.bsky.social•53 days ago

Thanks for this! I look forward to digging in, with concern about the mechanisms that drive knowledge creation and discovery. #openscience #KM

therealsaiph.bsky.social•52 days ago

It's very sad when talented people have to spend too much of their time engaging in fund-raising (😩) and politics (🤢) rather than doing the things that love, and which would benefit the human race the most.