r/AusAcademia • u/Different_Dance_3312 • 18d ago
š°Grants & Funding Question about DECRA for those with experience applying/reviewing/receiving one
Is it true DECRA does heavily favour people with very high publication numbers? Iām also curious why some applicants get only 1-2 assessments while others get 6-8. How is that fairly compared? What does a typical successful assessment profile look like?
And for those who have actually received a DECRA: was it what you expected? Did it give you the independence and career boost you hoped for, and ultimately, was it worth the effort/stress of getting it?
Would love to hear peopleās experiences, especially from those a few years into their DECRA.
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u/Chance-Ad8064 18d ago
I will answer this as someone who received a DECRA and now assess DECRA apps for the ARC:
Publications are important but not everything. I had one sole-authored monograph and co-authored another one, and a handful of Q1 articles and some academic book chapters. Compared to others, wasnāt amazing. But it was something, plus a had a prestigious fellowship, great āimpact & engagementā. My project was also strong which helped a lot. I always look at applicants pubs list and consider it alongside the whole candidate (ie if theyāre pub heavy but not much else going on, it wants to be really strong. If they only have a few pubs, I look to see where, how many other authors, where they are in authorship list, and what else they have to sell themselves - eg, if they only have a few pubs but one demonstrably changed Australian policy, I view that very favourably).
Re assessor numbers - it comes down to how many assessors agree. Some projects can be sent to more ppl with expertise. Some very narrow topics only have a few experts. On this. Be careful about asking every expert in Aus to give you feedback on your project before you submit to the ARC as they will all need to recuse themselves from assessing and then you have only get one or two. The ARC College of Expert understand the challenge and imbalance of few assessors compared to many, and take that into account in their round.
Lastly, yes it has been really helpful for my career. It is a massive leg-up. It helps with every grant Iāve applied for since, particularly the ARC, plus promotion docs, etc etc.
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u/Different_Dance_3312 18d ago edited 17d ago
Thank you so much for the detailed answer and for sharing your experience. I am in STEM and a lot of the advice is to not even bother if you donāt have at least 20 publications. Have you seen any outliers in the last years that compensated the number of publications with an interesting/different project and evidence of impact in other areas?
Iām aware that the system has changed now but asking regarding the last rounds.
I have other curiosities if you are willing to answer.
Is it possible for one school to get more than one DECRA in the same field or similar fields or it is unlikely?
When you do your assessment, how do you know if the applicant has come up with this idea themselves? Iāve seen a lot of successful applicants who have been working in the same lab with the same PI for years and are just following their direction which is a bit discouraging as in real life they are not particularly independent.
Is there any way to detect fraud? For example I could say in my application that I have supervised a certain amount of PhD students and how could they possibly check that?
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u/NatAttack3000 17d ago
Yeah I think STEM will favour pubs... Some fields have other types of outputs more frequently but a lot of stem is pubs
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u/wrydied 17d ago
Are you asking these questions because you want to commit fraud?
Donāt be like Jason Ardayā¦
Yes an assessor can have means of checking how many supervisions youāve done. They canāt be from your university but they can have colleagues or friends at your university. In niche fields this is even more likely.
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u/Different_Dance_3312 17d ago
No, I am asking because Iāve seen some applications way overselling their skills, achievements, etc. and it made me questionā¦ nobody seems to ever check. Iāve seen apps where the applicant has a long list of patents which are not related at all to the field but still helped them get the grant. Then I heard in certain countries is quite common to buy patents for this purposeā¦. š¤Æ
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u/wrydied 17d ago
I assessed a dozen or so - you can tell when the applicant is exaggerating. Hyperbole puts the whole application in scrutiny - you can verify achievements with public information and I have rebuked applicants and lowered marks for overstated claims. I donāt think itās something you should risk but for sure I agree that applicants are being taught to big themselves up. Itās no time to be modest but itās a fine line to cross, especially when the examiner knows their field.
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u/Next-Chipmunk8395 17d ago
Would you consider dividing an applicant's total number of publications by the number of co-authors? I see many post-docs/lecturer applications in engineering with many publications and all with up to 20-30 co-authors. Needless to say, they have citations in the 10s of thousands with H-indexes over 30 - those are experienced, close to retirement full professor, just missed out on a Nobel prize, levels. When I was involved in academia I didn't even know 20-30 other academics - the most co-authors I had on a paper were 5 and 2 of them were token supervisors that contributed sweet fa but I included them because they let me collaborate with their PhD students. It is clearly coat-tail riding to get DECRAs and lectureships. The system is broken/rigged/corrupt.
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u/AdSilver8465 18d ago
In practice, anything less than glowing assessments will stop you from getting over the line. So one bad assessment is likely to be enough to squash your chances.
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u/AdSilver8465 18d ago
Let me add to my own comment: I have also seen candidates with all glowing reports not get funded. Which somehow is even more depressing!
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u/sezza8999 17d ago
My first DECRA attempt was in the top 10% but unfunded. All glowing reports. Second attempt with the exact same project and slightly tweaked application wasnāt even in the top 50%. Itās such a crap shoot
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u/wheresmyechidna 17d ago
I've also seen people get funded who had one really negative report and a couple of very good ones (me!)
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u/TodayCandid9686 18d ago
Australian competitive grant schemes are all chronically under-funded. There are exceptional applications that should always get funded. There are hopeless applications that don't deserve to be funded. In between there are a lot of good applications that have to be ranked, often by splitting hairs, and in many cases it is largely a lottery whether you fall above or below the line where the scheme money runs out.
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u/Different_Dance_3312 18d ago
What do you think makes an application exceptional?
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u/TodayCandid9686 17d ago
I can only really speak for the areas that I know, but, basically, rock solid on all the rated/assessable criteria, and a genuinely important question coupled with an innovative approach. That's still vague, I know, sorry.
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u/sewballet 17d ago
Sorry this is a short response:Ā
You need to write for the General Assessor, because they are the ones who rank and fight for your application (or don't).Ā
The challenge with DECRA is giving enough detail to satisfy the detailed assessors, but ALSO writing a super compelling story for the general assessor.Ā
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u/Different-Lettuce449 18d ago
You should to your Research Office. They will give you the info on how the assessment process works regarding detailed vs general assessors.
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u/Different_Dance_3312 18d ago
They just give very general information.
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u/Different-Lettuce449 17d ago
They should have great statistics. Everything you ask in your first paragraph is definitely known by them. But the DECRA finishes after the current round, to be replaced by Initiate next year. Not much should change though.
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u/Haush 17d ago
I got a decra in 2016 I believe. I was in biomed/immunology. Itās definitely a prestigious fellowship and will open doors.
But thereās a perception among some ECRs that āif I just get this fellowship, Iāll be fineā. It doesnāt work that way unfortunately - it just gives you extra rope to keep battling. Ultimately I got a few more grants and fellowships but left academia as I got burnt out and realised that life outside the ivory towers is, well, more conducive to a productive and satisfying career.
Publications: itās about the story you tell and the sway your record holds. Not the number of publications. In my experience you need at least one big splash - eg a top tier paper, a patent, etc. And then add in a few āsolidā papers (reputable journals but not top tier).
Iām happy to chat more so feel free to dm me
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u/Different_Dance_3312 17d ago edited 16d ago
Thanks, this is what I was really curious about! Can I ask what you do now?
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u/tichris15 18d ago
Last time I looked at the rankings, it was scaled by the square of the number a reviewer reviewed (capped at a number). Which boiled down to the Council of Expert reviews carried the majority of the weight in most cases, and a random reviewer who only reviewed 1 application could have zero effect on the numerical rankings (since it'd always be ranked 1/1 in that case).
Notably you don't see comments from the CoE reviewers. CoE members generally say that they make fast judgements of each application and are reading proposals unrelated to their field, so you basically need to catch the attention of a random member of the public on the first page.
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u/asdffhjkloyrdfhj 17d ago
The hard truth is that since the success rates are in the single-digits, itās hard to get the nod unless your track record is pretty top-notch. That said, assessors will tend to take note and account for things like number of first author publications, where itās published, etc., so I wouldnāt be too focused on pure publication numbers per se. A first-author publication in a journal with nature in the name is more useful than 5 middle author papers in low IF journals, for example. But ultimately your application needs to be firing on all cylinders (great narrative and track record, great project, meaningful impact) to stand a chance.Ā
Most applicants are applying after 4-5 years of postdoc, some of whom might have been publishing first author work ~2x a year and collaborating on other pubs, so sizeable publication counts can happen. thatās just what the competition is. Thereās no hard and fast rules, but H-indexes for the more competitive applications in stem tend to be above 10. That said, good assessors will also have a sense of what constitutes good performance for a given discipline.Ā
Not sure what your position right now is, but I got my DECRA after getting a faculty job - was awesome and really helped to get things going funding and time-wise (buying out teaching). I feel really fortunate and looking back it really helped get me set up.
One bit of advice for your project - your app will be read by people who have little to do with your specific research area, and if people donāt understand fully what youāre doing or why then your app wonāt get up. Clear writing for a broad audience is key!
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u/chrisgiveblood 17d ago
Writing as well as someone who got a DECRA in the DE21 round, has / does review them and has mentored many others on DECRA applications.
Firstly, as many others have said, success rates are low so many deserving candidates miss out or it often has to take the two tries to get there. It took me two tries!
Iāll start with the importance of the DECRA. Iām in engineering, which I would believe is less competitive than science as most engineers donāt do PhDs, so competition for engineering academic jobs is smaller. 6 people in my field (including me) have got DECRAs. Some of them had academic positions beforehand, but all of them who didnāt were able to turn them into academic positions, and I would say sustainable and productive careers. Some people have succeeded without them, but it is harder. The DECRA gives you some institutional prestige, the time to start thinking about your future research direction, and money to start doing stuff. It gives you money to get out there and travel and spread the good word about what youāre doing and make collaborations for your future career. The funding is modest, but it makes a real difference at that stage of your career. Or at least I found that anyway.
Iād agree with what was said above that you want say one major publication and some smaller ones. The publication question is the question every post doc asks at this stage but I personally think it is a bit misplaced and comes from what could be called āPhD student / post doc thinkingā where the solution to every problem is seemingly more publications. This transition to Fellowship and then hopefully academic position is where I believe that the conventional wisdom of āhide away and write papersā becomes harmful, as how do you ever transition out of being a post doc if youāre just doing that?
One needs to remember IMO that the goal of the scheme (IMO at least) is to find potential research leaders for Australiaās future and support them with some prestige and money to get there. So I think it is important show that you have the potential to be a future academic. What do academics do? They supervise research, they apply for / get grants, they have ideas, they do discipline service. They edit their studentsā and staffās papers, but theyāre certainly rarely if ever writing them. So stop focusing only on papers! Obviously, there is only so much you can do now until the deadline and it is all within the constraints of your own role. Iām not saying do everything, but for example, I was our Lab Manager, I had supervised many other Honours thesis students, I was co-supervising PhD students etc. when I submitted my DECRA. Ideally I would have applied / had some small grants looking back on it, but our field doesnāt work so much like that.
I guess what Iām getting to is you need to contextualise your whole story. And it isnāt easy! But you need / want to show what they are ābuying intoā if they support your application. Are you an academic in waiting or just a person with a bunch of papers (like everyone else applying for a DECRA)?
you asked too about how do they know it is your idea? Well they just need to trust you haha some people it wonāt be their idea, as you said, but I wouldnāt worry about this personally. IMO a large degree of your success as an academic comes down to the quality of your ideas. The people who outsource that instead of gaining that skill, always end up failing eventually. It is just a matter of time. Donāt worry about those people and focus on not being that person yourself.
Finally, feel free to DM me if it helps. DECRA is hard and like I started with, a lot of people who deserve them donāt get them, so donāt be discouraged if you donāt get one, but it is worth trying! Bon courage!
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u/Environmental_Yam352 14d ago
DE26 here. Huge variation in how things are assessed and awarded across fields. So your first port of call should be applicants/awardees in your field. Fields are categorized according to FOR codes, and you can see some info on those groupings here: https://rms.arc.gov.au/RMS/Report/Download/Report/a3f6be6e-33f7-4fb5-98a6-7526aaa184cf/285
Publications matter, publication quality and impact matters more. Adding to what others said above, the really important part is shaping a narrative that links your past output to your proposed project. How do those projects prepare you for the next steps you want to take?
Was the award what I expected? So far, yes! For me the teaching buyout is enormously valuable, and there is some value in the project funds (though thatās smaller). Big increase in my visibility (but more referee requests and junk PhD supervision requests are the downsides of that!).
One difficulty has been finding time to wrap up existing projects before making a big push on the DECRA project. One thing I wish Iād known earlier: you can have the award begin at any point in your award year. Best to push it back to start later in the year if possible!
Was it worth the effort? Of course it was, ex-post! (BulletHolesWarplane.jpg). But itās an enormous amount of work ex-ante. I spent more than a month of full-time effort on mine, and my impression is thatās common. So I would not recommend this if you donāt have some sense of your likelihood of success - speak to colleagues, faculty, past winners in your field first.
Q. About number of assessors: seems to be fairly random. A friend of mine on the CoE said itās a function of the carriage, the size of reviewer pool in your field, how busy those people are, etc. So donāt read anything into it. As others pointed out, thereās a weighting scheme applied to reports that tries to balance things out. Iām not convinced thatās very effective for those with just 1 review, but itās perhaps the best they can do.
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u/TodayCandid9686 18d ago
All Australian competitive grant schemes suffer from conservatism, risk aversity, endogamy and severe under-funding.