Examples
Worked examples
- Is an instance
A mid-sized university's central research support services division includes its office of sponsored programs (pre-award proposal support and post-award compliance), a set of shared core facilities (imaging, sequencing, mass spectrometry), a research data management service, and an IRB/IACUC compliance office -- each available to any researcher at the institution rather than duplicated department by department.
Counter-examples
Looks similar, but isn't
- Not an instance
A department that hires its own dedicated grants administrator, working only on that department's awards and reporting to the department chair rather than a central research office, is providing a research-support function departmentally rather than as a centralized research support service -- see the centralized-vs-departmental distinction below.
Editorial commentary
Research support services covers the range of institutional infrastructure — administrative, technical, and regulatory — that exists to let individual investigators focus on the research itself rather than rebuilding shared capacity project by project.
What it typically includes
- Sponsored-programs administration — pre-award proposal development/budgeting and post-award compliance/financial administration, usually run through an Office of Sponsored Programs.
- Core research facilities — shared instrumentation and technical services (imaging, sequencing, mass spectrometry, and similar), covered in CASRAI’s guide to how a research core facility operates.
- Research data management and IT infrastructure — data storage, DMP support, and computing resources.
- Regulatory and compliance support — IRB, IACUC, biosafety, and export-control review.
- Research development — grant-writing assistance, funding-opportunity identification, and proposal coaching.
- Technology transfer — invention disclosure, licensing, and commercialization support.
Centralized vs. departmental delivery
Institutions vary in how far these functions are centralized versus run at the department level — a real tradeoff between economies of scale/consistency (centralized) and responsiveness to a specific department’s needs (departmental). See CASRAI’s comparison of departmental vs. central sponsored programs offices for how this plays out for the sponsored-programs function specifically.
The procurement sense: research support services as a contracted service
Institutions also use “research support services” as a category when contracting external vendors — for example, issuing a Request for Proposal (RFP) for a third-party biostatistics, data-management, or clinical-trial-support vendor to provide a function the institution does not maintain in-house at sufficient scale or specialization.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is “research support services” a formal job title or office name?
It varies by institution — some use it as a formal division name, others use it as a general descriptive term covering several separately named offices (sponsored programs, core facilities, compliance, etc.) rather than a single unified office.
Do research support services only apply to federally funded research?
No — these functions typically support all sponsored and institutionally funded research, though specific compliance requirements (like federal procurement rules) apply only to federally funded awards specifically.
Machine-readable encodings
Use in your systems
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