Annual reporting guide · National Science Foundation program
MRSEC annual reporting: what the report needs and where the time goes
Materials Research Science and Engineering Center
A MRSEC report covers the whole center: every thrust, every shared instrument, and every Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) student. Describing the science takes the least time.
What reviewers look for
The thrust structure, meaning the Interdisciplinary Research Groups and seed projects, and how the shared facilities serve researchers outside the center.
The sections that cost the most time
- Personnel, by thrust
- People move between thrusts during the year, and the National Science Foundation (NSF) wants counts by role and by demographic category for the reporting period. A directory that only records current members cannot answer that.
- Shared facilities usage
- The split between internal and external use shows that the facility serves the wider research community. The numbers come from instrument logs that were never designed to be totaled.
- REU participation and outcomes
- Participant counts with demographic breakdowns for each activity, plus what the students did afterwards. Most of this lives in a coordinator's spreadsheet.
- Publication acknowledgment
- Each paper must be checked for whether it cites the award number. Authors forget, and nobody finds out until the bibliography is assembled.
What a MRSEC is
MRSECs are multi-institutional materials centers funded by the NSF Division of Materials Research. A MRSEC is organized into research thrusts: Interdisciplinary Research Groups (IRGs) plus seed projects. It also runs shared experimental facilities that researchers outside the center can use.
That structure makes the reporting hard. A MRSEC is several overlapping groups, a facility with external users, an education and outreach program, and a list of partners, all reported as one center.
What the annual report asks for
The report goes to NSF through Research.gov on a cycle tied to the award start date, not the calendar year, and it is due within ninety days of the end of the period. Most coordinators start about sixty days before the deadline.
The sections are largely shared with other NSF center programs: executive summary, personnel, publications and research products, outreach and broader impacts, events and meetings, partnerships, facilities, seed funding, leveraged funding, compliance, and plans for the next period.
What is particular to a MRSEC is how much of that has to be reported by thrust. Personnel, publications and seed funding all have to be attributed to a thrust, and thrust membership changes during the year.
Where the time goes
Most of the time goes into collecting information from other people, not into writing.
The same problem appears in every center we have worked with: getting people to answer. A postdoc left in March and nobody updated the roster. Three papers acknowledged the award and two did not. The facility manager has usage logs but not the split between internal and external users. The REU coordinator keeps the participation numbers in a spreadsheet on one person's laptop.
By the time all of that has been collected, the reporting window is nearly closed and the narrative gets written in a weekend.
How SimplyScholar helps
Writing the narrative takes a weekend. Collecting the information behind it takes the rest of the year.
We built mrsec.org, the MRSEC program website, and we have built National Science Foundation program websites since 2016. SimplyScholar, our software for research centers, keeps people, projects, publications and outreach in one structured record.
Two parts of it help with a MRSEC report. Publications are imported from CrossRef by Digital Object Identifier (DOI) and matched to your researchers. People have roles with start and end dates, so a question about the reporting period gets an answer for that period, not a list of today's members. The center's public website is built from the same records.
A MRSEC report asks what happened during the reporting period, and SimplyScholar keeps that history.
Other annual reporting guides
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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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National Science Foundation program
DMREF annual reporting guide
Smaller, focused materials design awards. The reporting work is nearly a center's, without a center's coordinator.
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Department of Energy program
EFRC annual reporting guide
The Department of Energy counterpart to a MRSEC. A different reporting template and portal, with nearly the same underlying data.
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