Annual reporting guide · National Science Foundation program
DMREF annual reporting: what the report needs and where the time goes
Designing Materials to Revolutionize and Engineer our Future
DMREF awards are smaller and more focused than a MRSEC. The reporting work is nearly the same, and often it is nobody's job.
What reviewers look for
The data-driven materials design story, and the collaboration between experimentalists and theorists.
The sections that cost the most time
- Research products beyond papers
- Datasets, software and code are main outputs of a DMREF and are reported as such. They rarely have Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs), owners or version records until somebody goes looking.
- Experiment and theory collaboration
- The design loop is the premise of the program, so the report must show it working. That story is built from evidence held by two groups.
- Personnel on a small team
- The same role and demographic breakdowns as a large center, on a team small enough that one graduate student changes a percentage.
- Leveraged funding attribution
- Tracing a new award back to the collaboration or seed project that produced it, when no system recorded the link at the time.
What a DMREF is
DMREF is the materials-by-design program at the National Science Foundation (NSF), part of the Materials Genome Initiative. A DMREF award is smaller and more tightly scoped than a MRSEC. It funds a focused team that pairs experimentalists with theorists and computational groups, working through a design loop instead of running a facility.
What the annual report asks for
Broadly the same sections as any NSF center award. The emphasis is different: reviewers want to see the design loop working, with predictions guiding experiments and experiments correcting predictions. Two separate workstreams that share a cover page are not enough.
Research products matter more here than the section title suggests. Datasets, software, code and workflows are outputs a DMREF is expected to produce and report, alongside publications.
Where the time goes
Small teams carry the full reporting load.
A MRSEC has a coordinator whose job includes the report. A DMREF often has a Principal Investigator (PI), a co-PI and one graduate student who was given the task. The reporting work does not shrink with the team, so the same eleven sections land on people with no administrative support and no system.
Research products are the specific problem. Papers have DOIs and appear in a bibliography. A dataset on a group server, or a code repository with four contributors, does not. When somebody asks what the team produced this year, the answer has to be rebuilt from memory and version history.
How SimplyScholar helps
A DMREF has a center's reporting work and a small team's staff, so any system has to take very little of their time.
We built dmref.org, the DMREF program website, and we have built National Science Foundation program websites since 2016. SimplyScholar, our software for research centers, also works for a single award.
Publications save a small team the most time. They are imported from CrossRef by DOI and matched to your researchers, so nobody retypes citation details. People have roles with start and end dates, so the team can answer questions about the reporting period without rebuilding the roster. The public website is built from the same records.
Other annual reporting guides
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National Science Foundation program
MRSEC annual reporting guide
Multi-institutional materials centers. The report depends on the thrust structure and the shared facilities, and both need data collected all year.
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National Science Foundation program
MIP annual reporting guide
Mid-scale user facilities for materials synthesis, characterization and theory. Most reportable output comes from external users.
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National Science Foundation program
PREM annual reporting guide
Partnerships between a research university and a minority-serving institution. The report is read for education and workforce outcomes, especially the student pipeline.
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