PS21091 - An evaluation of methods to ascertain the comparative costs of research disciplines

Descriptions

***THIS IS NOT A CALL FOR COMPETITION**** This contract has been awarded. Aims and Objectives The aim of this work is to: • Update and evaluate methods to calculate the relative costs of conducting research in different disciplines, to assist funding bodies to assess the comparative costs of research across disciplines. • The evaluation carried out in this project will allow funding bodies to decide on the optimal method for calculating the relative costs of research in different disciplines, ensuring that they are aware of the advantages and the methodological limitations of each method. This information will help to inform future allocations of institutional block-grant research funding. Objectives The objectives of the work are to: • Explore data sources that provide circumstantial or direct evidence for the relative costs of research, and run models of relative research costs based on the data. Review the available data that can be used to provide evidence on the relative costs of research across disciplines. Review the existing Transparent Approach to Costing (TRAC)-based methodology identifying alternative data sources to replace the data collected from universities, to produce up-to-date models of relative costs of research based on TRAC data. • Propose new methodologies based on new data sources. All methods and data sources should be compared to one another and to the existing methods, which drawon data from universities' HESA returns. • Produce a critical evaluation of the strengths and weaknesses of eachmethod, highlighting challenges for the method Reports will be for the internal use of the funding bodies and UKRI. It is not intended to publish the full text of this work.