The Research Strategy Office is keen to pursue, and support, an evidenced based approach to Research Policy. As such we undertake, and collaborate on, projects to increase our understanding of the research system. In this section we list the projects we are currently working on.

Projects

Action Research on Research Culture | ARRC (click for more info)

Narrative CVs (more details)

Many research stakeholders have expressed concern that standard academic CVs places too much emphasis on a narrow set of achievements such as publications authored, and grants won. Narrative CVs have been proposed as a way to reduce this emphasis by allowing researchers to include a more diverse collection of information about their skills and achievements. The study on Narrative CVs tests how using a new CV format (specifically, the UKRI-supported “The Résumé for Research and Innovation”) changes the application experience and shortlisting outcomes for recruitments to postdoc vacancies at the University of Cambridge. The study also explores how applicants go about preparing CVs, how recruiting PIs use information available to them to make shortlisting decisions, and whether shortlisting decisions could differ based on which CV type a recruiter is presented with.

Research Development (more details)

The dynamic between early career researchers/academics (ECR/ECA) and their principal investigators (PIs)/managers is formative in shaping academic careers. Research suggests potential conflicts in the different professional expectations held by ECRs and their managers. To delve into these differences we are employing three different qualitative, narrative-based methods to explore how PIs and postdocs perceive their roles and professional relationships.

First, through ‘Your research, your voice’ we are exploring how early career academics and research supervisors think about their respective roles and professional relationships. This research will be asking participants to respond to three writing prompts (the participant chooses which one they would like to respond to). The purpose of the prompts is to inspire diverse and honest submissions that will provide exploratory and novel insight into the interpersonal aspects of the researcher experience. For EDI purposes, we will also collect background characteristics and ask a few open-ended questions about professional expectations.

Second, ‘Research Culture Celebration’ invites nominations of PIs or Research Groups that foster positive research culture. Nominations are structured around applicable teams, for PI nomination they include leadership, concern for professional development, recognition and reward, wellbeing management and support and inclusive practice. The last three are also a part of the themes for group nominations alongside collegiality.

Lastly, ‘My Postdoc Journey’ collects online diary entries which will be used to capture how first-time postdocs at the University shift from thinking about what the role might be like to knowing and experiencing the job in practice.

Precarity (more details)

This project will test the potential for redeployment initiatives and short project extensions to mitigate precarity in EARLY research careers and understand the trade-offs necessary to allow this to happen. Through our research, we aim to get a better understanding of the perceived benefits of, and potential challenges arising from, contract extensions and redeployment schemes from the perspective of institutions, PIs, and postdocs. Our research follows a sequential exploratory mixed methods approach, where a qualitative phase is followed by a quantitative phase (Pluye & Hong, 2014). The qualitative phase of the project lays the groundwork for our quantitative empirical work, a discrete choice experiment, which will confirm and generalise our findings and increases the scale of our research.

At this point, the effectiveness and feasibility of redeployment and contract extensions have not undergone thorough empirical investigation. Our goal is to better understand which characteristics of redeployment and contract extensions increase researchers’ subjective level of job security, that is, their feeling and perception of job security, and the attractiveness of pursuing a research career. We also want to empirically quantify the relative importance of these characteristics, i.e., how researchers trade off between them. From existing UoC recruitment and HR data and a review of redeployment policies across UK universities, we want to infer how feasible and successful current redeployment frameworks are.

Improving Inclusivity in Grant Funding

There is considerable evidence suggesting that researchers from marginalised backgrounds apply for, or receive, grants at a lower frequency than non-minoritized researchers. This project aims to enhance our understanding of how grant application and award rates differ among various groups of researchers (academics and postdocs) at the University, including women, racially minoritized individuals, and disabled researchers. We are comparing grant outcomes based on a broad range of protected characteristics in a quantitative analysis of internal data. Additionally, we are using qualitative methods—including staff surveys, staff interviews, and literature reviews—to examine the stages of the grant application process where inequalities may arise. We are gathering intervention ideas from researchers, supplementing them with suggestions from literature and consultations with advisors. Researchers will then help us assess the potential impact and cost of these interventions to better inform University decision-making.

We have an initial list of interventions identified through preliminary discussions and literature review. Here, you can find a working list of the current ‘menu’ of interventions, along with a submission box where you can share information about potential papers, reports, and other sources discussing strategies to improve the funding process.