Many federal agencies maintain records on researchers funded by their grants. The National Science Foundation (NSF) stores data reported by grant recipients in its “Fastlane” system.
The PDP obtained access to Fastlane to explore the quality and types of data available on postdocs.
Purpose
The Federal Agency Survey (FAS) tested the feasibility of using a funding source (the NSF grant-reporting database) as a list of individual postdocs.
The data received from NSF presented two challenges:
- Contact information was often absent
- Data were drawn for fiscal year 2006 (two years before FAS was administered)
While assessing Fastlane for sample-building, PDP examined several other trends related to postdoc data, such as:
- Postdoc definitions
- Differences between foreign-and US-degreed postdocs
- Distinguishing postdocs from other research staff
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