Annual reporting guide · National Science Foundation program
PREM annual reporting: what the report needs and where the time goes
Partnership for Research and Education in Materials
A PREM is judged on whether the partnership helped students move forward. That is the hardest part of the report to show, and the easiest to under-count.
What reviewers look for
Education and workforce development, with particular attention to Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) outcomes and the pipeline of students from the minority-serving partner.
The sections that cost the most time
- Student pipeline and outcomes
- Where students went after the program is the main result, and it is tracked over years. It needs records on people who have already left, and few center systems are built to keep them.
- Partnership activity
- The National Science Foundation (NSF) wants evidence that the two institutions worked together: exchanges, co-authored papers, shared students and joint courses.
- Participation demographics
- Required for each activity, not only in total, and the categories have to be collected in a way that passes a privacy review.
- Publications with partner co-authors
- Co-authorship across the two institutions is the clearest proof that the partnership works, and it has to be found in the bibliographies.
What a PREM is
A PREM is a partnership award between a research-intensive institution and a minority-serving institution, funded through the NSF Division of Materials Research. The materials science is real, but the program exists for the partnership and the students who move through it.
That changes what the annual report is for. A MRSEC report has to show that a center is productive. A PREM report has to show that a partnership is working and that students are getting somewhere because of it.
What the annual report asks for
The shared NSF center sections all apply: personnel, publications, outreach, events, partnerships, facilities, seed and leveraged funding, compliance, and plans for the next period.
The weight sits differently. The education and outreach section, one section among eleven for most programs, carries much of the case. Reviewers look for REU cohorts, what those students did next, and whether the minority-serving partner takes full part in the work.
Where the time goes
Two problems take most of the time, and both come from how the program is built.
The first is tracking students over time. A PREM is measured on outcomes that happen after a student leaves, and a directory built around current members has nowhere to record them. So the answer is rebuilt each year from memory and LinkedIn.
The second is evidence of the partnership. Everyone involved knows the collaboration is real. Turning that into a list of exchanges, co-authored papers, shared students and joint activities, with dates, is a research project of its own every spring.
How SimplyScholar helps
A PREM is judged on what happened to people who have since left, in a partnership between two institutions. A spreadsheet is poor at keeping that history.
We built prem-dmr.org, the PREM program website, and we have built National Science Foundation program websites since 2016.
In SimplyScholar, our software for research centers, people have roles with start and end dates, so a cohort that finished two years ago is still on record. Publications are imported from CrossRef by Digital Object Identifier (DOI) and matched to researchers at both partner institutions, which makes co-authorship across the partnership easier to find. Projects and outreach are kept in the same record, and the public website is built from it.
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
EPIIC annual reporting guide
Capacity-building awards. The report must show new institutional capability, which leaves much less evidence than research output.
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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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