DE27 – the last of the DECRAs as we know them...?
- Dr Catherine Dandie
- Oct 16
- 4 min read
Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) applications open on January 28 2026... so why are we talking about them so early, you may ask?
Well, if you've been keeping up with the latest in all things ARC (see our accompanying blog on the changing landscapes of ARC fellowships and funding), you might be on top of the fact that this will be the last round of the DECRAs as we know them. Future early career fellowships are still somewhat unknown, although the most recent announcement from the ARC indicated that some form of a standalone fellowship scheme for early career researchers (ECRs) will still exist, but for the exact format, well...watch this space.
In the meantime, it is time to start planning your application if you are thinking about putting your hat in the ring for this final tilt at the current format DECRA.
What can you do to start early?
There are plenty of things you can do at this early stage to get yourself ready well before submission.
Start talking early about your ideas with your colleagues, supervisor, peers, mentors – anyone who will listen really! Bouncing ideas around and getting feedback on whether your ideas have legs will give you confidence to pursue them through the hard work of putting together a full proposal.
Talk with your research office – they may require an official notification of intent to submit – and the deadline for this may come up sooner than you'd think! They can also advise on any eligibility concerns and help you assess your competitiveness.
Register your details on the ARC's Research Management System (RMS). If you haven't used this before, it can be useful to familiarise yourself with the system well before you need to upload your proposal and ensure that your details are up to date. You don't want to be doing this all at the last minute and risk not being able to submit your proposal!
Update your CV with all your recent and relevant publications, research outcomes, achievements, recognition and opportunities. Fellowship applications are built on your strong track record, so it is important to have all the information at hand before you start to draft this all-important content.
Familiarise yourself with the DE26 Guidelines (GO ID: GO7423) – available via GrantConnect, the Australian Government grant information system. This will give you an excellent starting point to understand the different sections that are required for your application – and we can be hopeful that there will be few significant changes when the DE27 guidelines are released.
Benchmarking
We mentioned competitiveness above – and it is an important consideration. It can take a lot of effort and many drafts to write a compelling fellowship proposal, so it is worth investing time now to consider whether this is the right scheme for you. Success rates in the 2024 and 2025 rounds were 19.6% and 17.9%, so although 200 projects are funded, that still means many hundreds of applicants walk away disappointed.
The ARC publishes the details of successful projects via its Grant Announcement pages – the link to the full list of successful DECRA 2025 projects is here. Take a look at those success stories – who from your discipline or field of research has done well in recent rounds and what characteristics can you glean from their public profiles that may have contributed to their success? How does your track record stack up in comparison? It can be a hard but valuable conversation to have with trusted colleagues/mentors to make the decision to forge on with your submission or to decide that your energy is best spent elsewhere.
Publications are one easily accessible measure of the potential competitiveness of an applicant – note we say potential competitiveness, as there is a lot more than just publications that goes into assessing your track record. But it's one place to start. For the past 4 years when outcomes have been announced, we have gathered the publication metrics of successful DECRA recipients to gain some insight into the variation in their published outputs (Table 1). Most DECRA recipients will have a Google Scholar (GS) profile these days – due to the comprehensive coverage of GS of many different output types and generally higher citation counts – but for some, we had to go looking in Scopus as well.
Table 1. Descriptive statistics: publications, citations and h-index for 2022-25 DECRA recipients.
Before you focus just on those mean or median values – note the variation for each of these measures, with h-index as low as 1 and as high as 92 for successful recipients. This is where doing some additional homework can be very valuable, by looking specifically at recipients in your discipline and noting how publication and citation rates vary. You have the chance to provide this context in your application (Research Outputs Context, current part B10), where you can explain to assessors why your publication rates and citations are above average or exceptional for your field.
But keep in mind that the assessment also focuses on your top 10 publications (in part B11, your 10 Career-Best Research Outputs) - so if your earlier papers were a bit hit and miss but you've really hit your stride in recent times and published a few ‘bangers’ (e.g. first or senior authored, highly cited outputs in exceptional venues that reported significant/ground-breaking outcomes), then emphasising your strong upward trajectory will be an important consideration in how you frame your narrative.
What else can I do to give myself the edge??
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