ROSES-2021 Research and Analysis Yearbook

Introduction to the Research Program Yearbook
ROSES-2021
Version 1.0
Michael H. New, PhD
Deputy Assoc. Administrator for Research
Science Mission Directorate (SMD)
National Aeronautics and Space Administration

In my over two decades of service at NASA HQ, I have been asked for statistics about the Research and Analysis program more times than I can count by both the science community and various NASA advisory groups. The Yearbook is SMD’s attempt to provide a single, regularly updated, set of statistics about its research and analysis programs to all interested Individuals.

This is the inaugural release of the Yearbook. It is intended to serve as a “living” resource: as new analyses are performed by the SMD Data Analytics Team, the results will be added to the Yearbook.

This first release concentrates on comparing information about science teams of proposals submitted to Research Opportunities in Space and Earth Sciences (ROSES) 2021 to the cumulative information about science teams of proposals submitted to ROSES 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, and 2020. Information about both submitted and selected proposals are discussed. Included in the data are basic demographics of PIs and Co-Is (e.g., gender, race, ethnicity, disability status, career stage) as well as information about the organizations submitting proposals (e.g., university or NASA center, Carnegie Classification of institutions of higher education, whether the institutions of higher education are historically black colleges and universities). Also included are data about the proposal selection rates and the duration of the review process for each of SMD’s five Divisions (Astrophysics, Biological and Physical Sciences, Earth Science, Heliophysics, and Planetary Science) as well as programs that are cross-Divisional (e.g., Exoplanets Research Program).

Results are presented at the SMD Directorate and Division levels; results at the program level cannot usually be reported publicly because the relatively small number of proposals submitted to each solicitation means that the identities of some researchers may be determined based solely on the solicitation and one or two demographic details.

Demographic data was sourced from the NSPIRES system which, since 2016, has offered registrants the opportunity to complete a demographic questionnaire. Carnegie Classifications of colleges and universities were derived from public data files at https://carnegieclassifications.acenet.edu/resource/. Lists of various types of minority-serving institutions maintained by the US Department of Education (https://www2.ed.gov/about/offices/list/ope/idues/eligibility.html) were used to determine if an institution that submitted a proposal was a minority-serving institution.

To make the Yearbook as useful as possible to as many groups as possible, NASA invites comments about data and analyses. Submit your questions or suggestions to hq-smd-yearbook@mail.nasa.gov.