ARC Investigator and Field MapperBETA

ARC Investigator and Field Mapper is an analytics tool designed to support evidence-informed Australian Research Council (ARC) grant application development and strategy: benchmarking, prospective detailed assessor insights, and field-level intelligence. It automates the collection, cleaning, and textual and statistical analysis of ARC grant data that would otherwise require extensive manual searching and processing.

The mapper has two modules:

1. By searching for a named investigator's name, the investigator module produces a profile, aggregating all ARC grant records associated with that investigator, summarising their funding history and track record leading grants, and performing word frequency analyses derived from funded projects' summaries and classifications for visualisation in word clouds. This supports more targeted positioning of proposals in relation to assessor expertise and expectations (and, conceivably, review of research performance with regard to ARC grant funding more broadly).
2. By searching for a six-digit 2020 ANZSRC Fields of Research (FoR) code, the field module generates a report on funded research activity associated with that code, integrating data associated with codes from the 2008 ANZSRC classifications upon user request. This report includes total funding, average grant amounts, institutional participation, Discovery Project team size breakdowns, and visualisations of dominant research themes and classifications via word clouds. This facilitates users' benchmarking against funding norms, identification of dominant and emerging research themes, and assessment of detailed assessor availability under specific FoR codes.