Administrative assistance with your research

Administrative Officers – Research (AOs-R)

Administrative Officers – Research have been appointed to each campus, as part of the Academic Services & Quality team in the Faculty of Education, to support academic staff in relation to their research responsibilities. These appointments recognise that academic’s research responsibilities involve a range of administrative tasks in addition to the technical tasks of research design, data collection and analysis, and publication.

What help is available?

AOs-R help researchers by:

1. Assisting with research documentation and reporting (eg. collating information for research nodes, preparing documentation for the annual DEEWR publication audit and other reporting requirements, ensuring funding applications are received by the University Research Office, tracking processes for recognising research, word processing and reformatting articles for publication, preparing power point presentations for conferences and seminars, word processing research reports, inserting tables and graphs into papers).
2. Supporting information exchange (eg. sharing information between academics about research interests, publications, funding opportunities, conferences amongst staff, providing information and advice about research, ethics, funding processes, promoting research node activities and areas of research expertise to current and prospective students through the web and display materials).
3. Providing practical support (eg. organising meetings, scheduling interviews, finding basic material on a specific research topic, preparing formatted CV’s, creating Endnote files, putting information supplied by the researcher into forms, formatting references)

Remember: AOs-R are not Research Assistants. They are not expected to provide research assistance but to support you by providing high-level administrative services relevant to your research responsibilities. If you need research assistance, you must access funding to purchase that kind of support for your research.  

What can I reasonably ask of an AO-R?

AOs-R are professional staff appointments. Remember this when you ask an AO-R to undertake a task for you. In particular, make reasonable demands in terms of:

• Expertise: Our AOs-R Position Descriptions ask for high level word processing, data entry and administrative skills not knowledge and experience in research. Therefore, it is not reasonable or appropriate to ask AOs-R to do research, conduct interviews, search the literature or take entire responsibility for the preparation of your ethics forms, research reports or funding applications.
• Judgment: AOs-R are required to make judgments about the tasks they do and how to do them. But it is not reasonable to expect them to make academic judgments, eg. about the conduct of a literature search, the selection of relevant or important articles for your research, the way to answer questions about ethics, who to approach for interviews or research information.
• Use of resources: Would you do a task that you ask of an AO-R? If you wouldn’t, don’t ask them to do it. There is a limited resource base for research. Just because there are AOs-R, don’t assume that they can do all the things you might want to do in your wildest dreams! It is important to ‘cut’ your research design to the ‘cloth’ available (ie. your own labour or labour that you can purchase through research funding).

Further questions?

Ask the Coordinator Research Services by emailing research@education.monash.edu.au or call 9905 2896.