Overview of best practices for quantitative analysis of economic and academic benefits of research-enabling facilities

Abstract

This report provides an overview of best practices regarding quantitative analyses of the economic and academic benefits of research-enabling facilities, and a few comments about potential pitfalls. A defining characteristic of research-enabling facilities is that they provide some sort of service to a group of researchers who are treated more as clients than as collaborators. This brief overview summarizes the contents of a suite of papers regarding quantitative and qualitative methods for interrogating the Return on Investment (ROI) in research-enabling facilities in financial and other terms. Among the reports analyzed in pursuing the issue of assessment of research-enabling facilities, it is possible to discern five different types of quantitative assessments of return on investment. This report also discusses best practices in depiction of return on investment analyses and utility evaluation generally for research-enabling facilities. All of these best practices are applicable to research institutions at larger scales.