On a mission

Over the last week or two I've been on a mission to gather stats on just about everything you can think of here at the NGS. Some of this was at the request of our funders and some of this was a "stocktaking" exercise here at the NGS.

One area that has became more important for the NGS is funding and PI's. Our funders (JISC and EPSRC) want to know who funds the researchers that use our resources so funding councils, universities, industry etc. It certainly builds up an interesting picture for us! In turn the funding councils want to know which of their researchers use the NGS. Now while we know who our users are, many of the research councils are interested in who the PI's are.

Obviously this is information that we have to rely on being provided by the users when they complete the application form to use our resources. We recently updated the form to make the funding field and PI field compulsory no matter if you are a new user or are asking for a renewal. It only takes 2 secs to fill in this information and helps us tremendously in keeping track our usage and stats.

We have had some teething problems with PhD students putting their own names down instead of their supervisors and users performing biomedical reserch putting the AHRC down as their funding council! However we're sure we can tidy up the database with some help from our users so please help us to accurately populate our databases.