I get all kinds of requests to answer a variety of questions about sponsored research. There are annual reports, semi-annual reports, quarterly reports, and many ad hoc reports. These reports are generated for sponsors, senior leadership, for audit purposes, many of the offices in central administration, and school deans and departments. The majority of these reports pull data from GMAS and the general ledger. Every piece of data is valuable in GMAS and should be completed as accurately as possible. Every project that is entered into GMAS will appear in one of these reports eventually.

Here is a short list of GMAS data that I commonly correct for some of these reports due to incorrect or missing data:

Sponsor and Prime Sponsor

The sponsor and prime sponsor fields are often either reversed, or duplicated. In GMAS, a prime sponsor field is not required. The only time this field should be filled in with an organization is when Harvard will be the subrecipient of an award.

For example, if NIH is giving money to MIT and then MIT is subbing a portion of those funds to Harvard, NIH would be the prime sponsor in GMAS, and MIT would be the sponsor.

If NIH were giving funds directly to Harvard, then NIH would be the sponsor, and the prime sponsor field would be blank.

Duplicate proposals

Once in a while proposals are submitted in GMAS more than once (duplicate entry). When requests have been recorded in GMAS in error, they should be retracted and deleted. If this is not possible, the word “DUPLICATE” in caps should be inserted at the beginning of the proposal title

CFDA Number

CFDA numbers identify the program being funded by Federal sponsors. Often times, CFDA numbers in GMAS include spaces, or dropped numbers. CFDA numbers should always appear in the format XX.XXX (the first two numbers represent the agency, the three numbers after the period represent the program). The only time this format should be different is in cases where the program is unknown (in which case the format should be XX.Unknown), or when the project is a contract (in which case the format should be XX.Contract)

Proposal budgets

The proposal budget is a piece of data I cannot correct in my reporting. If the proposal budget is missing, any report that references hit rates/success rates (whether university-wide or by department) drastically changes. It is important that Initial, Competing Renewal, and Supplement requests have budgets entered into GMAS

Discipline code

See Discipline Code blog post for details about discipline code.

For more information on how I use data that is entered in GMAS for reporting, please feel free to contact me at michael_toon@harvard.edu.