Why you might be writing funding bids with the wrong readers in mind

As Funding Insight eases into its summer break, we spare a thought for all our readers who won’t be able to spend as much time away from a computer screen as they might have liked because they have grant application deadlines looming in the coming months.

To help focus your minds, we republish this reflection from May 2021 on who you will be writing for as you work up your bid. As the article makes plain, you won’t be writing for a panel of fearsome, omniscient mega-minds but rather inquisitive, intelligent but time-limited and pressured researchers (and others), much like you. And that requires a different mindset…

When you’re writing a research grant application, who are you writing for? And who should you be writing for? Considering these questions matters because tailoring your bid to suit the needs of its key audience (peer reviewers and panel members) will raise its chances of getting funded. But before you focus on who you are writing for, you might have to admit that a mixture of education and wishful thinking has led you to write for the wrong people.

You are not writing for teacher 

For most of our time in formal education, we write for an audience of one: for a teacher at school, a tutor at university and external examiners at crunch moments. We would write about a topic that our sole reader knew more about than we did, with the purpose of convincing her to grade our knowledge of one of her specialist areas as highly as possible.

This starts to change through masters or PhD theses and into early career and academic publications and grant proposals. You’re no longer writing for the all-knowing, functionally omniscient reader: the locus of expertise has started to shift. As a grant applicants you are still writing for highly skilled and knowledgeable people, but their expertise is not the same as yours. The chances are that you—not teacher, not reviewer—are now the expert in the topic you are writing about.

To quote Darth Vader as he battles his former mentor Obi-Wan Kenobi: “The circle is now complete. When I left you I was but the learner. Now, I am the master.” Now you are the master, you need to write like the master, not for the master.

You are not writing for your ideal reviewer

Because even if she exists, she’s probably too busy. Or conflicted. Or the funder’s review scheme doesn’t know who she is. Ask anyone who has—like me—served on a funding panel, and you’ll find decisions are taken on each application relatively quicky, especially compared to the time they take to write. There will not be a special one-day conference convened to discuss the merits of your proposal, and the scrutiny it will be subjected to will be less ‘fine-toothed comb’ and more ‘quick onceover with the clippers’ until a broadly defensible result is achieved.

Now we can return to our original question: who are you writing for?

You are writing for busy, best-available-reviewers

Your reviewers are mostly researchers too. And as researchers they’re under much the same pressures you are, only they’ve also got one or a whole bunch of proposals to review. It’s not that different from having a pile of marking to do, only they’re not the expert. They’re an expert, just not on every subject contained in that pile of work. As an applicant, you’d be well advised to make life as easy as possible for them by expressing your ideas as clearly and unambiguously as possible.

But to what end? Now you know your audience a bit better it’s worth considering the effect you want your text to have on them, or in existential terms…

What are you trying to achieve?

In your grant application, you’re trying to achieve three things—explain, inspire and reassure—in order to persuade.

1. Explain

Remember, you’re the master now, you can’t assume the reviewer knows the field as well as you do. So you need to explain what you propose to do: what are your research questions/hypothesis and methods, why are these the right methods, and how does the whole thing hang together as a coherent package? 

I don’t know who first said this, but a really well-written application flatters the reader into thinking she understands it, while a poorly written one beats her over the head with her own ignorance. As a non-academic, I don’t expect to understand how a technical proposal works, but I expect to understand what it’s for.

This is one of the hardest things for researchers new to grant writing to get right. Many drafts I see start at the wrong level of focus—they’ve zoomed in much too closely onto the key details that are most exercising the applicant but lack any kind of broader context or overview and end up functionally incomprehensible. Reviewers won’t recommend funding they can’t understand.

2. Inspire

Many early draft applications I see don’t adequately explain the novelty of what’s proposed, what the contribution of the programme of work will be, nor why it matters. When I ask, applicants will often look confused because to them, it’s obvious. It’s not, because it’s implicit. It needs to be explicit. Don’t leave your busy, best-available-reviewer to puzzle it out for herself.  Don’t overclaim, don’t overhype, but don’t undersell your work either. If you’re unable to clearly articulate the significance, novelty and contribution of your proposal, it’s too soon to apply for funding.

3. Reassure

Don’t submit research applications, submit research plans. You’re asking a funder to take a punt on your proposal ahead of others, so you need to make the funding panel feel confident about that decision. You do this by concisely and efficiently citing the right literature, by having the right research team with appropriate track records, and by producing robust, high-quality responses to the more administrative parts of the form. You can also reassure with your risk management plans, especially your plan Bs for if an experiment doesn’t produce the finding you predict. How might you recalibrate or refocus the project?

4. Persuade

Funding is competitive. There are more good ideas than there is funding for good ideas. It’s not like an A grade at school or a driving licence, or even a PhD, where there is an unlimited number available and where everyone who deserves one can have one. It’s not enough to be good, you need to finish in the top tier to get funding. You need to be more persuasive about the excellence of your proposal than the competition.

You can’t control what other applications will go to the same panel for funding, nor their respective merits. But you can give yourself the best possible chance by making sure your application is pitched at your actual audience, the best-available-reviewer—not the all-knowing teacher, your PhD supervisor or Obi-Wan Kenobi.

Adam Golberg is strategic research development manager (research growth) at the University of Nottingham. He tweets @Cash4Questions and blogs at socialscienceresearchfunding.co.uk.

The post From the archive: Know your audience appeared first on Research Professional News.

Lessons from a Danish research institute’s funding engagement scheme

The funding world is a jungle of possibilities. For classic research funding, it might be top-down or bottom-up; in innovation, dilutive or non-dilutive; and then there is the overload of abbreviations: RIAs, IAs and CSAs…

Truly, guiding researchers to suitable funding opportunities is no easy task.

To help researchers find and engage with the right schemes for them, many research managers and administrators organise awareness-raising activities. But they face well-known issues: researchers are busy, emails can be overlooked, central events rarely fit everyone’s schedules and targeted listings are resource-intensive. All too often, research support offices risk becoming passive rather than actively building a pipeline of future proposals.

Our journey

At the Danish Technological Institute, the research managers and administrators in our international centre have developed an awareness-raising process that works well for the nearly 1,100 specialists employed by the institute. This effort has increased both the number of proposals we submit and the number of projects we win. While every institution is different, we believe a well-thought-out awareness-raising initiative can bear fruit. Here, we outline our initiative, known as Outreach.

DTI is a research technology organisation, conducting applied research that bridges the gap between academia and commercial R&D. We’re an independent non-profit that operates test and demonstration facilities, so our researchers also perform commercial contracting for both Danish and international customers, and many clients become partners in our research projects.

It was the launch of the EU’s Horizon Europe programme in 2021 that prompted us to think strategically about our awareness raising. We decided to reinvent our approach based on the challenges we faced during previous framework programmes and put the user experience of our researchers at the heart of our work.

In particular, we knew that it was in sprawling top-down programmes such as Horizon’s second pillar, on global challenges and industrial competitiveness, that awareness raising could have the greatest return on investment. So while our centralised team of seven full-time research managers and administrators also supports proposals in a range of other programmes, our proactive efforts are focused firmly on pillar two and its associated joint undertakings.

Intense knowledge

When we redesigned our awareness-raising initiative, we set out to promote internal collaboration between departments and encourage our researchers to coordinate proposals themselves. We knew we’d be facing challenges along the way—particularly the workload that proactive awareness raising would bring to our small research support office.

Our Outreach initiative, scalable by design, has grown and evolved since its 2021 rollout but the core remains the same: we start by analysing the pillar two work programmes, which outline hundreds of funding opportunities for specific challenges. Our team reads all 1,500+ pages of those programmes—sometimes multiple times as drafts develop—to build intense knowledge of the opportunities available. We refresh our knowledge annually and hold office-wide workshops whenever new work programmes are published.

We also conduct ‘interest-mapping meetings’ with DTI’s 20+ R&D departments to stay updated on their interests, capabilities and priorities. These meetings, held at least twice a year, involve two research managers and administrators and a handful of senior researchers from each department. We’ve found that a mixture of shared note-taking and regular conversations keeps us up to date on various departments’ interests and ensures we always know which research managers and administrators will have the latest information.

Armed with detailed knowledge, our team matches researchers with funding opportunities, producing longlists at departmental level. These lists include details like expected project budgets and technology readiness levels, helping researchers make informed choices. We review these longlists in targeting meetings with departmental researchers, helping them select a shortlist of target calls.

We’ve found that well-informed research managers and administrators can really help researchers in prioritising multiple attractive opportunities due at the same time and understanding the funding programmes’ technicalities. Even experienced applicants can benefit from our knowledge of the political thinking behind specific ‘destinations’ within Horizon Europe, or our inside track knowledge on what’s coming.

Building capacity

In parallel, we conduct capacity-building initiatives including an institute-wide network focused on Horizon Europe, fostering peer-to-peer learning and expert insights through regular meetings, workshops and newsletters. We also run workshops and training courses to improve proposal-writing skills and build internal networks between departments.

This process puts our researchers in a strong position as they start engaging with their networks and forming consortia. While not every effort results in a proposal, this approach feeds a steady stream of engagement into our proposal-writing pipeline. More proposals entering the pipeline leads to more submissions, more projects won and more top-notch research.

Of course, the Outreach initiative is labour-intensive, so in late 2022 we started a concerted effort to develop tools to reduce the workload and automate tasks such as compiling lists of funding opportunities. Thanks to this, we created the Outreach Table, a digital platform on DTI’s intranet, which helps researchers see which of their peers are considering bids to similar opportunities.

Our Outreach work has certainly improved collaboration within DTI, and our Outreach Table has enabled early proposal collaborations to happen. The systematic approach has demystified Horizon Europe for our researchers, lowering barriers and increasing engagement in international projects. This has driven up interest and success rates in the programme and had wider positive impacts across DTI.

Pro tips

Our Outreach programme was designed specifically for DTI and will not be universally applicable. However, we firmly believe that a proactive approach to awareness raising is worth the effort. Here are some key takeaways from our experience:

• Decide which programmes to target—focus on those offering the greatest return on investment (which may not necessarily be financial).
• Adapt processes to your specific case—tailor your approach to your researchers and institution.
• Review and revise your process—be flexible to meet colleagues’ needs.
• It’s a team effort—collaborate with other research managers and administrators for greater effectiveness.
• Embrace digital tools—use technology to ease the workload.
• Accept that it takes time to save time—invest upfront in developing tools and processes for long-term benefits.

What’s next?

While we’re proud of our Outreach initiative, it’s still very much a work in progress. This year, we’ve begun developing tools that incorporate generative artificial intelligence to help us in our work while also keeping our eyes open for commercial tools that can directly help or inspire us.

We’re also now focusing on how to support researchers’ participation in external partnership activities earlier on in the process.

And we keep our ears open to ideas from outside DTI, and that certainly includes other research managers, research administrators and research support offices, so if you’d like to discuss any of the ideas presented here or maybe your own awareness efforts, please do get in touch.

Luke John Murphy is a consultant, Paula Andrea Páez is a senior consultant, and John Stian Haukeland is EU funding manager at DTI.

The post Tight focus can make awareness-raising initiatives pay off appeared first on Research Professional News.

Tips on partnership-building when time and budgetary pressures are paramount

Collaboration—and this is not a novel observation—is the lifeblood of science. And when scientists collaborate in pursuit of funding, their institutions will have to do so as well. Much has been written about how to make scientific partnerships work, but much of it fails to take into account the rushed and cash-strapped circumstances of most partnership-building exercises.

In this article, published in September 2018, Alison Lundbeck, research and innovation development manager at the University of Leeds, refers to the difficult contemporaneous context for universities and their researchers, but the picture she paints is remarkably similar to that existing now. Thanks to that, her six tips for practical partnership-building should still be relevant, too.

Recently in Funding Insight, Ross McLennan at the University of South Australia wrote about partnership building. He said it was essential that academics stop pushing their own agendas, listen actively to others and commit to making their partnerships work. This is certainly true, but this week I want to expand on these points and look at what we need to do in practice to make this happen.

Do more with less

We all know that UK research and higher education is continuing to change. There is austerity, the Higher Education and Research Act 2017, and changes to the Research Excellence Framework after Nicolas Stern’s review and Brexit. Many of these imply that we need to do more with less: there’s less funding available and more competition for it, and if successful there’s a demand for more auditable results. 

Expectations are growing, while confidence in the value of universities and research to society are at a low ebb.

The pressure is overwhelming, and it could be difficult for universities to deliver on all fronts. They must provide excellent teaching, world-leading research, societal impact, national productivity and more. They need cracking sustainable development and must deliver overseas development assistance. Value for money is important, as is interdisciplinarity for everything. We need to partner and collaborate to do bigger and better things that have practical outcomes, not just esoteric explorations that will sit on a shelf and gather dust.

Plus ça change

But so what? Is this really new? The mood music may have changed, but the fundamental purpose of a university hasn’t. The intrinsic value of research is the same as ever, and I think the values and motivations of researchers are too. Collaboration isn’t more important now; it’s just more lauded.

But isn’t it hard? Not really. Not if you want to do it. And I think most academics are intrinsically motivated to seek new knowledge, to quest and to make the world a better place. What better way to do that than by joining with other people? Inspiration doesn’t come by sitting alone in a room. The hardest problems probably won’t be solved by a lone genius. Others will have different perspectives, different skills and different experience that can help shine new light on an issue.

Collaboration in practice

So how do you go about it? There’s no single way, but there are certain things that can help.

1. Think about your motivation. What do you care about? What interests you about your research? What questions are you asking? What problems do you want to solve? Who could benefit from your research? You won’t be the only person in the world interested in these things. More importantly, you won’t have all the insight. Consider who else might be thinking about the same issues and start a conversation.
2. Don’t prejudge what you expect from a collaboration. Other perspectives, other tacit knowledge and other experience can bring insights you probably can’t conceive. You might have an ‘offer’. You might have an ‘ask’. But the best value isn’t transactional, it comes from open dialogue.
3. Pique the interest of others. That said, in starting a conversation don’t underestimate the value of “what’s in it for me?” Getting the ball rolling can be the biggest hurdle, and it’s important to pique the interest of a potential partner. If you’re making contact out of the blue (rather than, say, seeking an introduction from a mutual acquaintance or going to an open forum where attendees would expect to meet people around a shared issue), you can’t assume that other people have the same perspective on the situation, or will be able to see the possible value. Most people you might want to collaborate with don’t have the time to spend on something of no relevance.
4. Manage expectations and watch your language. Whether it’s a different discipline or a different sector, the acronyms and assumptions of a shared understanding of the same language can set your relationship back. Avoid (or at least explain) acronyms. Don’t get lost in irrelevant details. Even more of a pitfall is promising everything and delivering nothing. Set out early an understanding of how each partner works as much as possible, especially when working with those outside of universities. Timescales, processes, red tape, and even the type, scale or speed of deliverables expected can vary drastically between sectors. It’s important to tackle these types of issues upfront.
5. Build trust and collegiality. You might be an expert, but you don’t know everything. Develop a healthy respect for what colleagues can bring. Partners are your colleagues too. You’re coming together for mutual benefit, not because you have to, so make the effort.
6. If you have to negotiate, be as open as possible. It all comes back to trust, and understanding each other’s worlds. Can’t get authorisation yesterday? A certain cost isn’t eligible under a particular research funder? Need deliverable A, as well as pragmatic outcome B? Explain. Don’t assume your potential partners understand your sticking points. A fixed position can be misinterpreted as a strength in negotiation, but this isn’t a game of chicken. Leaving no room for manoeuvre has the potential to sink any collaboration. And you can’t be sure you’re not undermining the chance of an innovative solution. The underlying reason why a particular outcome is needed might not be the same as the thing itself: there could be a better outcome for all concerned. 

Is it worth it?

So is it all worth it? Hopefully, yes. We’re all pressured for time, but a stimulating conversation about an issue you’re passionate about can do the world of good for your motivation and enthusiasm back in the day job. Many hands can make light work when you’re trying to solve a complex challenge. In fact, many hands can make the work possible.

Reality is complex at the best of times: we’re all partial, subjective and limited in our own individual understanding. Take every opportunity you can to get a better view of the world, of the challenge you’re trying to tackle. You can’t understand the context, or how possible solutions may sink or swim in practice, without seeking the views of others.

Value the working relationships you already have, but don’t shut off from new opportunities. At worst, you might gain some valuable experience. At best, you might kick-start a brilliantly productive partnership and do some good in the world. Cross-disciplinary and cross-sectoral partnerships really are the key to meeting the big, global, integrated problems the world is facing. If a problem isn’t small, neat and standalone, it can’t be solved by a lone person. And aren’t those the sort of problems we really need to solve?

The post From the archive: Six practical steps for successful partnerships appeared first on Research Professional News.

US-based Kenneth Rainin Foundation is on the lookout for new ways to tackle unmet needs

Foundations in the US have a reputation for welcoming the kinds of high-risk, high-gain research ideas that national funders might be inclined to shy away from. The Kenneth Rainin Foundation, which focuses on supporting biomedical research on inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), is certainly one of them.

The foundation’s Innovator Awards support individual research projects with grants of up to $150,000 and collaborative projects involving multiple investigators with grants of up to $300,000. Usually it awards between 15-25 grants each annual round. For the current round, the deadline for initial applications (via a letter of inquiry) is 30 September, and 3 February for invited full applications.

In this interview published in July 2022, Laura Wilson, director, health strategy and ventures, at the foundation, explained that a strong idea was key to a successful bid, and that the foundation accepted that researchers with truly daring ideas “may be starting from scratch”.

Top tips

• Bids from those from outside inflammatory bowel disease or gastroenterology are welcome
• The foundation funds both basic and translational research
• Preliminary data may not be necessary; the foundation is happy to provide funding that will lead to preliminary data
• Do not be afraid of tackling any of the major questions around IBD; the charity likes high-risk, high-gain research

If you’ve worked in a lab, there’s a good chance you’ll have used the ergonomic pipettes designed by the late American businessman and philanthropist Kenneth Rainin.

The Kenneth Rainin Foundation, based in Oakland, California, awards grants for the arts and education, and also research into inflammatory bowel disease—the condition that ultimately led to Rainin’s death in 2007.

The foundation’s director of health, Laura Wilson, says that the funding is squarely focused on biomedical research for IBD, and not healthcare or patient education. She says that the Kenneth Rainin Foundation is one of just a handful of US-based funders that focus on the disease, though of course the National Institutes of Health is also a big player in the field.

High risk

“What sets us apart is we really do support high-risk, potentially high-reward grants,” Wilson says.

The funder’s Innovator Awards offer up to $150,000 for projects by individual researchers and up to $300,000 for collaborative projects involving multiple investigators. Funding is initially available for just one year, but there is the potential for projects to be extended for up to an additional two years.

The 2023 round of the Innovator Awards is now open. Wilson says the foundation usually receives 150-200 letters, which are whittled down to 40-50 applicants invited to submit a full application.

Wilson says she has roughly $6 million (£5 million) per year to spend on grants, and that on average 15-25 grants are awarded; of these about 80 per cent are in the US, however the funding is open to researchers around the world and the foundation is keen to have a global reach.

The foundation supports a mixture of basic biomedical research and more translational work, Wilson says. On its website it lists a number of focus areas, including cell biology, complementary therapies, diet and nutrition, immunity and inflammation, microbiome and new technologies.

“In a nutshell, bench to bedside, potentially having some benefits for the IBD patients within the lifetime of a grant,” she explains. While the foundation isn’t large enough to fund clinical trials, it does look for studies that could open the door to a larger trial, such as human-sample studies.

Preliminary data

While other funders of IBD research often require preliminary data, Wilson says that’s not necessary for Innovator Awards. “We don’t require that because sometimes when you do have that idea…you may not have that preliminary data, you may be starting from scratch. We do not require you to have solved the problem before you come to us with an application.”

The Kenneth Rainin Foundation doesn’t prioritise gastroenterologists or people with pre-existing expertise in inflammatory bowel disease. “Some of our most successful work has come from parasitologists,” Wilson says. “Taking knowledge from somewhere else and applying it and asking a question for an unmet need in IBD is highly attractive.”

As a mininum, applicants must have a lab of their own, but they don’t need to have a permanent academic position. This means that postdoctoral researchers are not eligible to apply for Innovator Awards, but Wilson says that the people supported by the foundation are as much of a focus as the research, and this includes junior researchers.

“We really encourage, in our programmes, for PIs to apply in a way that allows their postdocs and younger trainees to be lifted up and do work and [be] included on the grants.”

This support also extends beyond the lifetime of the grant, as Wilson says that the Kenneth Rainin Foundation sees itself as a “pump-priming funder so that, beyond our funding, you don’t fall off a cliff”.

While a year is a relatively short lifespan for any research project, Wilson says that in reality many of the foundation’s applicants end up being funded for longer.

“I would say 80 per cent of our current Innovator Awards, if they’re seeking a year’s renewal, they get renewed,” she says. Grantees are given plenty of opportunities to demonstrate their progress, including through progress reports and an opportunity to give a presentation to Wilson and her scientific advisory board.

In addition, there is the option of no-cost extensions if grantees have not used all their funding after a year but are making good progress.

Application process

Wilson clearly wants to make applying to the foundation a good experience. She says that, compared to other funders, the application process is “quite quick and painless” and the foundation encourages applicants to contact its health programme staff to discuss potential research ideas.

In terms of what the Kenneth Rainin Foundation is looking for in applications, Wilson says it comes down to “a novel idea that has a solid hypothesis” and a researcher with the capacity to answer the research question.

The post From the archive: IBD funder welcomes off-the-wall ideas appeared first on Research Professional News.

Suggestions for a smoother, happier process

Following on from Adam Golberg’s call to make internal peer review a more positive experience for all concerned, republished last week, we revisit his follow-on article on how that might be achieved—and a potential “spectacular own goal” to be avoided.

Most universities now have internal peer review processes for grant applications. How can we make them work better for all involved? There are several questions that follow from this initial one, and I’ll try to answer them here.

Who should do the reviewing?

The ideal reviewer is a senior academic with a track record of success with major research funding applications and some insight into the subject area. Even at research-intensive institutions, there is a limited supply of these people and their time is valuable. So our instinct is to ask senior professors, but I wonder if a closer review by someone less senior might be more useful at times. We should certainly think beyond the usual suspects, as reviewing can be a developmental exercise.

Should reviews be anonymous?

This is tricky. In my view, ideally, no. Being able to put feedback in the context of the reviewer’s background can be valuable. I also think that people should be willing to stand behind their comments.

However, because internal peer review has a filtering role, one could argue that the protection of anonymity is required for reviewers to be willing to say that proposals shouldn’t go forward. Or perhaps even so that academics will be willing to criticise colleagues’ work at all.

That said, I would expect the rationale for soft-filtering out an application to be one that most applicants would accept and understand. For a hard filter (when only a certain number of applications can go forward from the institution), there would usually be a committee decision bound by collective responsibility. I’m not aware of any research or internal survey work done on internal peer reviewers and their attitudes to anonymisation, and I’d be interested to see if anyone has looked at this.

How should reviewers approach applications?

It’s not obvious how to review a grant application. Those without much experience may be reluctant to trust their instincts or judgment because ‘it’s not really my area’. A small number go the other way and become power-crazy at the opportunity to judge others. They end up judging the proposal from their own personal, partisan perspective and completely write off entire academic disciplines and subdisciplines.

One option to try to reduce such responses is to ask reviewers to use the same form that the funder in question gives to referees or panel members. It’s a great idea in principle, but academics typically have a loathe-hate relationship with forms. Nonetheless, there are some specific questions we could ask reviewers in a structured way or use as prompts. Fewer questions will get better answers.

• What isn’t clear in the bid?
• What are the potential weaknesses?
• What’s missing?
• How could the application be improved?

But if I were to ask a single question, it would be the pre-mortem: if I could see into the future and tell you now that this application is not going to be funded, what will be the main reason?

It helps home in on key weaknesses: it might be fit-to-call, it might be unclear methodology, it might be weak impact pathways, it might be the composition of the research team. It’s a good question for applicants to ask themselves.

How should reviewers give feedback?

It’s not enough for feedback to be correct—it must be presented in a way that maximises the chances that the principal investigator will listen.

Ideally, I’d like a face-to-face meeting involving the internal reviewers, the research development manager, the principal and possibly the co-investigators. The meeting would be a discussion of a full draft in which reviewers can offer their views and advice and the principal investigator can respond and ask questions about their impressions of the proposal.

I like face-to-face meetings because of the feedback multiplier effect: one reviewer makes an observation, which triggers another in the second reviewer. A principal’s response to a particular point triggers a further observation or suggestion. If approached in the right spirit (and if well chaired), this should be a constructive and supportive meeting aimed at maximising the applicant’s chances of success. It must not be a Dragons’ Den-style ordeal.

In reality, with packed diaries and short-notice calls, it’s going to be difficult to arrange such meetings. So we often have to default to email, which needs a lot of care, as nuance of tone and meaning can be lost. I would advise that feedback is sent through an intermediary—another task for your friendly neighbourhood research development manager—who can think about how to pass it on: whether to forward it verbatim, add context or comments or smooth off some abrasive edges. I’ve had a reviewer email me to say that she’s really busy and ask whether I could repackage her comments for forwarding. I’m happy to.

A good approach is to depersonalise the applicant: that is, address the feedback to the draft application, not its authors. But I think depersonalising the reviewers and their comments is a mistake. Impersonal, formal language can come over as officious, high-handed and passive-aggressive. It will make applicants less likely to engage, even if the advice is solid. Using (even rhetorical) questions rather than blunt statements invites engagement. In other words…

Which would you respond to best?

• The panel’s view is that your summary section is poor and is an introduction to the topic, not a proper summary of your whole project. You should rewrite before submitting.
• Could the summary be strengthened? We thought the draft version read more like an introduction to the topic, and we think reviewers are looking for a summary of the complete proposal in a nutshell. Is there time to revisit this section so it better summarises the project as a whole?

Institutions invest time and money in having arrangements that provide prospective principal investigators with detailed feedback from senior academic colleagues to improve their chances of success. They ought to be glad of the support. It’s a spectacular own goal if the resulting advice is ineffective because of the way the feedback is communicated or the way the whole process is presented or perceived by researchers.

Adam Golberg is strategic research development manager (research growth) at the University of Nottingham. He tweets @Cash4Questions and blogs at socialscienceresearchfunding.co.uk.

The post From the archive: How to improve internal peer review appeared first on Research Professional News.

If research managers can lessen aversion to internal peer review, everyone benefits

Republished to coincide with the Association of Research Managers and Administrators’ 2024 annual conference, this article from May 2019 asks whether research managers should do more to make putting a bid through a peer review process a positive experience.

In the follow-up article, to be republished next week, Adam Golberg, now strategic research development manager (research growth) at the University of Nottingham, adds some suggestions as to how that might be achieved.

Internal peer review of research grant applications has two distinct functions that can easily become blurred.

The first function is to filter—to select which applications go forward and which do not. This has two variants:

• A ‘hard filter’ for a scheme or funder with formal limits on the number of applications that one institution can submit.
• A ‘soft filter’ where there are no formal limits on application numbers, but where there’s a steer from the funder to submit only the most competitive applications or there’s limited research development capacity.

The second function aims to improve the quality of the application, producing concrete suggestions to increase the chance of success. In a previous article I explained how research development staff could bring a fresh perspective to an application. Similarly, comments from a senior academic with experience as an expert reviewer or funding panel member can be helpful, but with the added benefit of academic expertise.

Both functions of peer review—filtering and improving—are often rolled together into one process. This may cause confusion for both reviewers and the reviewed. Do we over-emphasise the role of the filter at the expense of the improvement? Does fear of the filter reduce the efficacy of the suggestions for improvement?

How internal peer review comes across

When discussing internal peer review with academic colleagues, I’ve seen wildly different reactions. Some are very enthusiastic and hungry for comments and feedback. Others are a bit more…Gollum and don’t want anyone to gaze upon their precious.

Most are somewhere in the middle: they welcome useful comments and insights but are wary about being forced to make changes against their better judgment—or being prevented from applying at all.

There’s no denying that the ‘filter’ role exists. However, I try to reassure academics that in my experience it’s rare for a bid to be soft-filtered out because of internal reviewers’ comments and for the applicant to disagree with the rationale.

The reviewer has usually spotted something that the applicant missed, either related to the application or the underpinning idea. Perhaps it needs another co-investigator or stronger engagement with partners or the public.

The application may need to engage with a particular body of literature or requires more time to develop. Perhaps there is a poor fit to funder or too little time to work up the idea into a competitive application by the deadline.

When we send out details of calls with our internal timetables and internal deadlines for the various stages, are potential applicants seeing peer review (and associated deadlines) as a supportive process or a barrier to be overcome or even evaded?

Wires crossed

I sometimes worry that in our desire to set out processes to try to prevent and preempt disruptive last-minute applications, we end up sending the wrong message about peer review and about the broader support available.

If we’re dictating terms and timetables for peer review, do we make it look as if grant applicants must fit around reviewer and research support requirements and timescales? And is that the right way around?

To be clear, I’m certainly not arguing against having a structured process with indicative milestones with some level of enforcement. Last-minute applications are disruptive and stressful, forcing people to drop everything to provide support with no notice. Worst of all, rushed applications are seldom competitive. We absolutely should try to save people from this kind of folly.

And, of course, we need to allow time for senior (and therefore busy) academics to undertake internal peer review. I suspect that most institutions rely on a relatively small pool of reviewers who are asked to read and comment on multiple applications per year, and that few get any formal workload allocation.

While we should certainly give applicants plenty of time to write their applications, we need to treat our reviewers with consideration and value their time.

Putting peer review in a positive light

I’m not arguing that we disguise or minimise the ‘filter’ element of internal peer review in favour of an unqualified upbeat presentation of internal peer review being entirely about improving the quality of the application. But perhaps we could look at ways to present internal peer review in a more positive, supportive and developmental light.

The most important part of peer review positivity—and the subject of the second article of this series—is how internal peer review happens in practice: who reviews, how and when; and how and in what spirit reviewer comments are communicated to applicants.

If internal peer review as a process helps to strengthen applications, word will get round and support and buy-in will grow, one positive experience at a time.

But even before that stage, I think it’s worth thinking about how we communicate our internal peer review processes and timetables. Could we be more positive in our framing and communication? Could we present internal peer review more as a helping hand to climb higher, and less as a hurdle to overcome?

Adam Golberg is strategic research development manager (research growth) at the University of Nottingham. He tweets @Cash4Questions and blogs at socialscienceresearchfunding.co.uk.

The post From the archive: Framing internal peer review positively appeared first on Research Professional News.

The Leo Foundation launches a Research Networking Grant scheme

Top tips

• The international element is very important in this scheme.
• These grants should not be used for meetings to support ongoing research projects or potential research bids.
• Encourage participation across career stages at events.
• Meetings can be open beyond the research community where appropriate.

The Leo Foundation is the world’s largest private funder dedicated to skin and skin disease research. It granted 217 million Danish Kroner in 2023 and aims to award half a billion Danish Kroner a year by 2030. 

The Foundation’s best-known grants are its Research Grants, profiled in Funding Insight in February 2023. These open to applications three times a year, with the next deadline on 12 September.

This year, the foundation added two schemes to its portfolio, the Visiting Researchers programme, which supports international visits from Danish research institutions and vice versa, and the Research Networking Grants, which supports international knowledge-sharing within dermatology. Both schemes will open for their second round on 15 August and close on 2 October.

The Research Networking Grant can be worth up to 500,000 Danish Kroner (€67,000) and is open worldwide. It encourages participation from researchers at any career stage, including students, and money can be allocated for travel costs. 

Anne-Marie Engel, the chief scientific officer at the Leo Foundation, discusses what the foundation hopes for from its new schemes, focusing on the networking grant.

Why did the foundation launch its new calls in 2024? 

We are in the process of implementing our 2025 grant strategy, which directs our philanthropic activities into two main tracks: one supporting world-class skin research in different programmes, such as the long-standing Research Grants in Open Competition, and the Leo Foundation Dr Abildgaard Fellowships programme and Serendipity Grants, which were introduced last year. These programmes all support research projects.

The other track is to catalyse a strong and coherent global skin and skin disease research ecosystem.

Research Grants are of course an important instrument, but another important way of supporting the ecosystem is making sure people eager to meet and exchange ideas and challenge each other can do so. This is why we have introduced the networking grants.

We know from experience that new ideas come up when researchers meet in different settings, or when they visit people from another research tribe, so to speak. When researchers challenge each other in physical meetings, new and maybe important collaborations can emerge. 

What are the eligibility criteria for the networking grant? 

There are specific criteria for this instrument, and one is that it should be open to an international public. You cannot say that at this hospital we are having an internal educational session of some kind, and then apply for money. That will not work.

The call is also not open to researchers who would for instance like to get together to write an application for a large grant, for example to the Horizon Europe programme, together. 

The idea is for people who have a common interest in setting up a meeting or a network event of some kind to develop what they are already doing.

Should these groups also be open to the general public? 

Whether you invite people from the public will depend on those who make the agenda and what kind of meeting they would like to have. If it is relevant for a meeting to invite patients or representative organisations to discuss relevant topics, designing trials for example, that will be fine. We would not exclude anything like that.  

The meeting must have a starting point in a shared scientific question or topic, but who they invite to give input or inspiration is up to applicants.

What errors were made on bids to the first round? 

We had some applicants who saw the scheme as an opportunity to obtain funding for project meetings, for people to travel and meet to discuss a project funded elsewhere—and that was too narrow a mission. 

We also had a couple of applicants who saw this as a research project grant involving travel and meetings. They scoped a research project for us which we have other instruments for. The Research Networking Grants are specifically for meetings, for conferences, for symposia. It is important that applicants distinguish between our different programmes and their purposes. 

Does that point to a more general error that you might see on bids to other schemes?

Yes, a general pitfall is that people read the guidelines, but they read the guidelines through a lens to see what they would really like funding for. Quite a few applicants give us a call, or send us an email saying, “You’ve got this scheme, I’ve got this project, does it fit? What would it take to make it fit?”. We have a lot of good dialogue through which we can also learn about how people read the guidelines that we put out. This helps us to improve and adjust them.

Is this a pilot scheme or can it be considered as a permanent one now? 

When we introduce a new instrument, we introduce two deadlines that year. We like to run a few rounds just to gather experience. Even though we have done our best to design the instrument so it answers all the questions we can think of, we will not know them all. 

After a few rounds, we can stop and say “Okay, are there questions popping up or are people disregarding what we think is very clear guidance? Should we adjust anything? Do we get too many of some and too few of others? Should we try to invite some more people in with specific kinds of applications?”. But it is still too early to say about that for this year’s new instruments.

Were there many bids to the first round?

We didn’t get that many applications, but we did not announce it long ago. In our experience, it takes time to build up awareness in the scientific community, even though there is always a lack of money for good projects or good meetings. It takes maybe a year or so, depending on how frequent your application deadlines are, for the community to be aware that there is this option. 

There will be a build-up of interest, that is for sure. We know the need is there, it just takes a bit of patience from our side as well.

The post Opportunity profile: Bringing the skin research community together appeared first on Research Professional News.

Tips on justifying your proposal’s importance and methods

Research is all about asking questions. But in order to do that, researchers must often answer other questions on funding application forms first.

In a recent webinar organised by the Worldwide Universities Network of 23 research-intensive institutions, Taryn Bell, research development adviser at the University of Leeds, boiled these questions down to three essential ones where applicants frequently go awry.

In her words, they are: “What do you want to investigate, why is this important and how are you going to do it?”

Our first article about the webinar, published last week, reported on Bell’s suggestions for responding to the first question via a proposal’s aims and objectives. This second part deals with the other two questions.

Reach

To write a competitive funding bid, Bell said, applicants first need to reframe the central ‘why’ question. “When we write in a funding proposal about why our research is important, the people reviewing funding applications, and the funders themselves, are essentially asking a different question. They’re asking: ‘Why should I care?’”

A few funders—for example, the Leverhulme Trust in the UK—are willing to fund projects just because they are intellectually interesting, she said, but most funders don’t do this. The case therefore has to be made for a proposal’s impact beyond personal intellectual curiosity.

This could be done, Bell said, by considering the reach of the proposed research, meaning “the extent or range of its application, effect or influence”.

Identification

Bell proposed three steps to integrate reach into research proposals in order to tell the funder why they should care.

The first is to identify people within that reach, which is similar to identifying those who could benefit from the research. Bell advised applicants, especially those applying to fellowships, not to neglect an obvious answer to this question. She said: “In the very narrowest sense, it could be you. You can benefit from your research; it might benefit your own professional practice or confidence; it might be good for your career.”

Of course, even with fellowships, it is important to consider potential spheres of influence beyond that, Bell continued. The identification phase might start with institutional or disciplinary colleagues and move further out, perhaps into government, the private sector or a section of the general public, she said.

Bell emphasised honesty being key during the identification phase. She said that for many projects, the reach—which is closely related to the project’s impact—would be quite restricted.

“As an early career researcher, it wouldn’t be very usual for your research to have tons of societal impact, so don’t feel like you have to promise that you are going to change society.”

During the identification phase, it is also worth considering what benefits those audiences will derive from the research, Bell said. Again, something quite limited like “improved understanding” might be an acceptable answer there, but applicants should check that the funder is not keen for wider impact.

Planning

Bell’s second step is to plot out when the identified people within reach of the project could be involved in it. She stressed that an important cohort would need to be contacted before the bid is submitted and often before any writing has begun.

This is particularly true in biomedical research, she said, where patient participation and involvement is an increasingly vital component. But in most fields, the strongest proposals arise from consultation with others.

Early on, most applicants need to “start initiating collaborations, networks and co-production, and build the proposal together with some of those beneficiaries”. This does not have to happen in any formal way, she added. “Just bouncing ideas off people who might want to be involved can help you see your idea from a fresh perspective.”

Some people will only be strongly involved once the research has started, Bell said, and might come on board as project partners or to sit on a project’s advisory board, while others may be included after the project has concluded, possibly once results have been published or during follow-up research.

Engagement

The final step, Bell said, is an obvious one but needs to be stressed: researchers should actually contact some of the identified people within a project’s reach.

She said: “It’s really common for researchers to feel like they can’t get in touch until they have a finished proposal, but I would say do it now…People can take a long time to respond.”

As Bell had previously said, research ideas always benefit from being discussed with others, but there are other benefits to plucking up the courage to make early contact. “Reviewers love it when you’ve already got potential collaborators on board, or you’ve already had discussions with those audiences. It gives the reviewers confidence that you’re asking the right people and you’re developing that research idea.”

She also stressed the importance of identifying and contacting an institutional or department expert on impact early, as this person could give further ideas on evidencing an answer to that all-important question: why should the funder care?

Method

Finally, Bell turned to the question of how the research would be done. This is a question, she stressed, that needs to be answered in detail in the methods section.

Researchers should always strive to be specific—and that includes detailing the theories and frameworks underlying the methods themselves. This is too often omitted, she said, which plays badly with funders.

Spelling out a well-grounded theoretical basis for the research and the methods “ensures that the proposal doesn’t sound like you’re on a fishing expedition where you’re just throwing some ideas out there, trying to catch some data, but are unsure of how you’ll analyse it”.

Detailing the methods themselves means answering a plethora of questions. Bell listed some major ones: “What kind of information are you collecting? How are you going to collect it? How are you going to analyse it? When is it going to be done during the lifetime of the project? Where will it be done—at your host institution or do you need to go somewhere else? Who’s going to do it—you or a PhD student or a technician?”

And there is one final question that should not be neglected, she added. “You need to be able to answer: ‘Why not another method?’ Reviewers ask this all the time and for funding that involves an interview, that question will often come up then.”

Finding the right answer can be tricky, she warned: “Every method has limitations and risk—there is no such thing as a perfect method…but you must make a strong argument that you’ve picked your method for a good reason.”

The post Spelling out the why and how of a research bid appeared first on Research Professional News.

Nailing a vital section of any grant application

Guidance for grant calls will often spread over several web pages and online documents, which may often reference yet more web pages and online documents. Application forms, meanwhile, may require costed, itemised breakdowns of everything that will be needed to undertake a project, requiring projection years into the future.

For those new to grant applications, it may seem overwhelming. And it can be helpful to distil requirements down to their essential components.

At the start of a recent webinar organised by the Worldwide Universities Network of 26 research universities, Taryn Bell, research development adviser at the University of Leeds, did this by focusing on three elements.

In her words, “Every research proposal must answer three questions: what do you want to investigate, why is this important, and how are you going to do it?”

The what, she continued, centres on developing robust aims and objectives; the why, on “how you can maximise the reach of your research”, and how relates to methods and planning ahead.

Bell said that after reading “dozens, if not hundreds, of funding applications” she came to the conclusion that “these are the things that researchers most often think they can do but get wrong”.

“They are the fundamentals to any research project,” she said, and would be the focus of the two-part webinar, with the first part focusing on the first question—what do you want to investigate?—and how to answer it in a proposal’s aims and objectives. The second part dealt with the other two questions and will be covered in Funding Insight next week.

Aims or objectives?

Well-written aims and objectives are essential to any competitive funding application, Bell stressed. They are often used by funders during initial checks that bids are in scope and will provide an immediate first impression of a bid. Poorly written aims and objectives risked inspiring a lack of confidence on the part of reviewers in the researcher’s ability to complete that project, she added.

Not understanding the difference between aims and objectives often led researchers astray, she warned.

The aim, Bell said, is the project’s “main goal or purpose” and should be communicated by a “concise general statement—and you generally only have one aim per project”. Objectives, Bell said, “are how you’ll achieve that aim; you focus on specific steps, [their description] consists of longer specific statements and you’ll generally have three to four per project”.

Refining the aim

Ideally, a project’s aim—its overall goal—should be no more than one sentence long and the touchstone phrase for those composing one is ‘keep it simple’, she said. “One of the most common misconceptions I see is people thinking they need to use complicated terms and jargon that is specific to their discipline to explain their ideas. This is particularly untrue for the aim.”

Readers of bids are often not specialist in the proposer’s niche subject, she related—in the case of patient and public members of panels, they may not be academics at all. “When it gets to the methods section, you absolutely need to go into [a specialist’s] level of detail,” Bell said, but that was never appropriate for the aim.

How could researchers achieve a high level of accessibility? In two ways, Bell said. First, it helped to have a particular reader in mind when drafting the aim: “Imagine you’re speaking to an undergraduate student, they’re not an expert in your area but they’re interested to learn more. How would you explain in one sentence what your overall goal was, avoiding scientific jargon as much as possible?”

Second, by asking around. “Go and speak to someone who is a non-expert and read them your aim. Ask them honestly, ‘Do you understand what it is I’m trying to do?’”

She said that getting down to the required level of clarity and simplicity may result in some of the apparent novelty of the proposal being lost, but applicants should accept that. “The rest of the proposal will allow you to back [the aim] up with evidence and bring that novelty out. The aim will always be quite generalised and simplified.”

Measurable objectives

Discussing objectives, Bell stressed the need for measurability, which she defined loosely as “whether you can tell at the end of the project if you’ve achieved them or not”. Precise figures did not necessarily have to be used (for example, the number of subjects in a study), she said, although they could be.

The language—particularly the verbs—used in objectives is crucial to their credibility, she stressed. She warned against using phrases like, ‘As part of this project I will consider…’ or ‘I will explore…’ “Those vague terms are not helpful because it’s very difficult for anyone to measure whether you’ve considered something or not, or whether you’ve explored it.”

Instead, Bell advised the use of “measurable action verbs” and offered a handful of examples: assess, calculate, compare, contrast, identify, verify. Such words “actually tell the reviewer how I’m going to do the research”, she said.

Bell said that using these kinds of verbs was often easier for researchers who rely on quantitative rather than qualitative methods, but that these measurable verbs were almost always preferable to vaguer terms. She offered a few verbs and phrases that might help qualitative researchers: “You can say that you’ll develop a framework, or you might talk about describing something, or explaining or demonstrating it. If you’re looking at different arguments, you might talk about critiquing or appraising; you might be interpreting.”

But reading the aims and objectives of other research proposals in your field was often the best way for early career researchers to get a feel for the kind of language that is appropriate. That went for those favouring both qualitative and quantitative, she stressed.

The post Targeting your aims and objectives appeared first on Research Professional News.

Is relocation always advisable for a postdoctoral fellowship, and what if it’s not possible?

Postdoctoral fellowships are usually viewed as vital early stepping stones on the way to an independent research career. The idea that candidates could—in fact should—relocate for each stone is often taken for granted.

That idea has become less axiomatic over recent years as funders have accommodated the understanding that the best candidates for fellowships may have caring responsibilities or other reasons that preclude them from moving.

But still the questions remain—should early career researchers move for postdoctoral fellowships if they can? And if they can’t, how can they write compelling applications to funders who prefer mobility? In April 2022, Funding Insight columnist Adam Golberg gave his answers to those questions.

Most postdoctoral fellowship programmes encourage potential applicants to move institutions, though the strength of that steer and the importance placed on researcher mobility varies from scheme to scheme. At the extreme end, in Europe, the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions fellowship programme—arguably not exclusively a postdoc scheme—requires international mobility for eligibility.

Many schemes have softened their steer over recent years. Where once staying at your current institution required ‘exceptional justification’ or some similar phrasing, there’s now an increasing awareness that researcher mobility doesn’t make sense for everyone and that enforcing it has negative ramifications for equality, diversity and inclusion. 

It’s much harder and more disruptive for researchers with family commitments to move institutions, and harder for those with partners who are tied to a particular location for family or job reasons. There will be other researchers who are already in the best environment for their research and so any move would be a step down. It’s now common for application forms to allow space for both personal and EDI reasons why moving institutions is not possible, and intellectual and research reasons for not wanting to move.

However, there is still a fear that whatever the guidance notes may say, the reality is that reviewers still expect researchers to move for a postdoc fellowship. Or that competitive pressures and limited funds may make it harder for non-mobile proposals to be scored high enough to cross the threshold. 

It’s not obvious that an exceptional researcher with an exceptional project in a mediocre environment—for whatever reason—could be competitive against rivals who were judged exceptional across all three categories. Even if that researcher had very sound EDI-related reasons for not moving institution. It’s a tricky issue and there’s no obvious solution, other than a lot more money for fellowships.

Why do funders want researcher mobility? Funders will say it’s a good thing, but the reasons are rarely fully articulated. I think there are at least four reasons to look to move:

1. It will grow your network. You already have your contacts and collaborators at your current institution, and any from any previous institutions. Moving institution will lead to an introduction to new research groups with different facilities. You can grow your network from one place, but it’s hard to replicate the dramatic network expansion from moving.

2. It will expose you to a different culture and way of working. Even if some things will be better, some worse, it all contributes to intellectual and professional enrichment. If you’ve not moved, it’s easy to think that there are no alternative ways of working when a problem arises.

3. It will allow you to reinvent yourself. If you’re working with researchers who remember you as a PhD student, or even an undergraduate, it’s difficult for colleagues not to continue to see you that way. I know of a few people who’ve been ‘lifers’ at a single institution and experienced a huge rise in their status in the new institution after moving, because their new colleagues have only ever seen them as a dynamic young researcher.

4. It will boost your progression towards independence. Sitting in the same lab with the same people, it’ll be very hard to move out of their shadow. Especially if they’re very senior.

Should I move?

Probably, yes, unless you have personal reasons that make moving difficult or impossible, or you’re confident that you’re already in the best place to undertake your research. One factor to consider is how mobile you’ve already been between undergraduate studies and now. The less you’ve moved, the greater the benefits to moving now.

Don’t feel disloyal about moving. Good researchers and mentors know that mobility is a good thing for your development and that your move could potentially strengthen their links with your target institution and boost collaboration. What’s more, your institution is talking to PhDs and postdocs from other institutions about fellowships. This is how things work.

Hopefully you’ll already know people who work at your target institution and they’ll be able to point you in the right direction. If you don’t, that makes life harder. You could ask colleagues for an introduction and a recommendation or send your CV and a proposal to the research group you’d like to work with. Copy in a research manager or administrator. They can only say no. Or not reply at all. But good research groups will be delighted to hear from talented researchers who work in a relevant area and are willing to apply for a fellowship.

It’s important to make contact early. You’re not going to get a warm reception if you contact the institution a few weeks before the deadline. They will want to help you shape and improve your proposal, and there will be costings and approvals to agree. Your current host institution can’t help you apply elsewhere; the responsibility is all with the new host.

What if I can’t—or justifiably don’t want to—move?

A few Google searches might tell you how many successful candidates in the fellowship scheme’s last round moved and how many stayed where they were. If not, you could ask a friendly neighbourhood research development manager if anyone has looked at this before.

If there are at least some successes, you should attempt to address the non-mobility question throughout the application, not just in the boxes where you’re specifically asked about it. If there’s a presumption in favour of moving and you’re not moving, you need to show that you’ve got a solid plan to achieve as many of the benefits of mobility as possible.

• Have you moved already? If so, look for a way to stress this and explain how you’ve benefited. Don’t just rely on reviewers seeing it in your career history—that’s often a section that’s skim-read.
• Can you be mobile within an institution? If you’re moving to a new research group or your work bridges your old group and new one, you can present that as both a form of mobility and evidence of your pathway towards independence. On that note, no one is saying you’re never allowed to speak to your old mentor or supervisor again. But can you put some—physical, intellectual, organisational—distance between the two of you in the application? Can you foreground the collaborations you’ve built, the talented researchers who’ve worked specifically with you?
• Make a positive case for your current research environment. If it has the right equipment, resources, facilities, collaborators, say so. Don’t merely make the ‘negative’ case for why mobility is difficult or impossible for you. Reviewers don’t need persuading that you’re telling the truth there. Instead, persuade them that your current research environment is outstanding.
• Can you visit other institutions as part of your fellowship? The factors that make moving institutions difficult presumably also make extended visits difficult too. But could you spend a month (or longer) at another research group (maybe even internationally) to, for example, learn a new technique or expand a new collaboration? Even micro-visits can be useful.
• Have a plan to expand your (academic and non-academic) networks. This could be conference attendance (real or virtual), it could be greater visibility on social media or other channels of communication. It could be volunteering to organise your school’s seminar series. These are all ways of ensuring that you get at least some of the network-expanding benefits of changing institution without actually changing institution.

Adam Golberg is strategic research development manager (research growth) at the University of Nottingham. He tweets @Cash4Questions and blogs at socialscienceresearchfunding.co.uk.

The post From the archive: Should I stay or should I go? appeared first on Research Professional News.

What to pay attention to when consulting call documentation

As the first and last piece of advice most funders will give, ‘read the call spec’ may seem to require no more explanation than that. Not so, Funding Insight columnist Adam Golberg retorted in this article from July 2021: how you read the call spec and what you look out for are crucial to giving your bid the best chance of succeeding. Poring over call documents may be painful, Golberg admitted, but this is an instance where the adage ‘no pain, no gain’ will often be proved correct.

‘Make sure you read the call spec’ is one of the most frequently dispensed pieces of advice from grants managers and research offices alike. It might sound mind-numbingly obvious, but a not insignificant proportion of applicants to most funding schemes—especially the smaller ones—won’t have followed it and their chances of success will be slim to none.

While most applicants won’t make such an elementary error, it can still pay to unpack what this apparently self-evident advice actually entails. Knowing how call literature is usually written and presented, what to look out for and how to read it can, in the final analysis, make the difference between your bid sinking or swimming.

Three elements

A typical research funding call will have three core elements: a strategic overview of the call, with aims and objectives; a practical guide to applying; and the application form (or online portal) itself.

The overview will outline the aims of the call, what the funder hopes to achieve and why, and explain what’s in and what’s out of scope. These documents have varying degrees of clarity and precision. Sometimes they will be very clear: we want x, y or z and nothing else. Sometimes they will be more open and feature a core area and then some ‘including but not limited to’ examples. Sometimes calls are more confusing and have a matrix of cross-cutting themes and topics.

The application guide will tell you how to actually go about applying. It should include all of the practicalities and may go into further detail about what’s expected in each section of the application form. It will explain costing rules, the call timeline and how to log in to the online system. Sometimes there’s an online FAQ document, too, and if there is, bookmark it and return to it, as some funders will update it as they’re AQWIF (asked questions with increasing frequency).

These days, most application forms are either online submission systems, downloadable and uploadable templates or a set of guidance notes to configure your own Word document. The application form may be standard for the funder or bespoke to the scheme, or a tweaked version of a standard form.

For almost all calls, you should be able to locate text with these three distinct purposes even if they’re configured differently. If you can’t, you’re probably missing a document. Some schemes combine the overview and the application guide, while others put the whole lot on one sprawling page.

Read closely

My primary piece of advice is to actually read the documents. All of them. Even the dull bits. Slowly. Read them out loud, or out loud in your head. It’s so easy for researchers to skim through, only looking for the bits that interest them and perhaps misunderstanding the call. It’s crucial to understand what the funders are trying to achieve with the call. Its existence is not an accident. One or more organisations is trying to achieve some very specific aims.

If you don’t understand what those aims are, you can’t help them spend their money to achieve them. The more complex the remit, the more important it is that you locate your proposal clearly within it. Remember, for complex calls, the reviewers may be confused, too. Quote their framing language back at them.

The application guide will contain important insights into what exactly reviewers will be looking for in individual sections of the form. Sometimes questions on the form will just contain a short title while leaving the detailed explanation to the guide, where it can easily be missed. This is poor practice on the part of the funder, but it happens all the time.

Study the form

If you’re seriously considering a bid, you should engage with the application form or online submission system as early as possible. You need to get a sense of what information is needed and how much of it, in order to plan your workload and to enlist the support of colleagues where needed on specialist sections. This could be intellectual property, public engagement, data management and so on.

Some funders will provide a PDF printout as a sample form. That’s helpful, but it’s no substitute for exploring the submission portal itself. Sometimes questions that appear to be binary ‘yes/no’ responses on a printout will turn out to have hidden supplementary questions or ask for further details.

The balance and focus of the application form may tell you a lot about the priorities of the call. If you’re asked about it, it matters. If you’re looking at applying for a networking grant and they ask for a lot of detail about legacy and much less about the specifics of your topic, that will tell you what’s important to them. If they ask a lot about impact, you should have a lot to say about it. Sometimes an application form will tell you almost as much as an overview about what the call’s aims really are.

This is also crucial: when you forward your draft for internal review, make sure it’s on the official form. You’ll get much more useful feedback on an application that’s presented in its natural habitat.

You should enlist the support of your friendly neighbourhood research development professional as soon as possible to help you interpret the call. He or she will likely have seen many similar calls before and will be able to help you frame the project you’d ideally like to do to suit the projects the funder would ideally like to support, or find you a more appropriate call to consider instead.

Nuts and bolts

There are key elements of information you need to locate in any funding call. When is the deadline? Is this a single-stage application or is there an outline stage? If an indicative timetable is provided for the full call, make a note in your diary of the later stages of the process, too, especially if there’s a full application stage. You don’t want to be surprised by an invitation to submit a full application that you hadn’t factored into your workload after the success of an outline that you’d forgotten all about.

How much funding is available? How long can projects last for? What are the costing rules? All of this will constrain the size of your project. You need to find out how far the budget will go as early as possible—there’s no point designing a project that’s unaffordable.

Minesweeping

I mentioned ‘minesweeping’ in a previous piece about last-minute applications, and it’s a key part of reading the funding call. Minesweeping is the detailed study of the call documentation (including the submission portal) for anything that might explode and sink your bid if it’s not dealt with early.

You need to read all the call documents because you need to be aware of any particular or unusual requirements of the call. If it’s an international collaboration scheme, it might have rules about numbers of partners from named countries or categories of country. If it’s an industrial collaboration, it might require small business participation or perhaps industrial leadership. If there’s an emphasis on career development, perhaps the funder wants to see an early career researcher as co-investigator. Perhaps there are very particular requirements for the principal investigator. Unusual call requirements are not at all unusual and generally make perfect sense in the context of the call aims. You need to be aware of them early, as they may require you to identify new partners.

I know it’s easy to get swept away with the excitement and possibilities of a new research funding call that looks like a great fit with your research ambitions. But it’s important to take a breath and to invest that extra bit of time at the start of your process to make sure you’ve got the best possible understanding of the call, its motivations and the application process. Only then can you ensure that your bid will give the panel the feeling of ‘good fit’ that leads to a project being greenlit.

Adam Golberg is strategic research development manager (research growth) at the University of Nottingham. He tweets @Cash4Questions and blogs at socialscienceresearchfunding.co.uk.

The post From the archive: Read all about it appeared first on Research Professional News.

Six tips for getting the most out of conferences

Most of us are put off by the thought of entering a professional environment and engaging with total strangers or, worse, people we haven’t previously met but know who they are and who might have a bearing on our future career. Most of us are equally ill at ease asking questions of experts in a field when we are not totally sure we are on solid ground with those questions. And most of us do not appreciate compulsory consumption of thin, bitter coffee.

And yet many of us keep turning up at conferences where all of these situations are likely to occur. So, how to handle them? Phil Ward tackled this perennial question in this article, published in June 2017.

Conference coffee is unique. It lures you in with the promise of a sensory jump-start for the post-lunch plenary, but it delivers nothing but empty heat and the memory of something better. And yet you’ll be awash with it. Like Kate and Leonardo endlessly running down corridors in Titanic pursued by dark and mysterious water—innocuous but deadly—that will be you and the coffee. Surviving it is the first and most important rule of thriving at a conference.

You could just abstain for the duration, or favour tea instead. The tea’s usually fine. You could ration yourself, safe in the knowledge that less is definitely more. You could find a wonderful little hipster coffee shop close by, and nip out a couple of times a day for a shot of caffeine and sanity. Whatever you do, once you’ve beaten the conference coffee, the rest is a breeze.

In addition to a foolproof coffee strategy there are six simple steps to getting the most out of a conference. And not one of them involves checking the lifeboat-to-delegate ratio.

1. Plan well

You might have had to choose your sessions before arriving, but don’t let that stop you from thinking again once you’ve got the full programme in your hands. The programme, like the coffee, often promises more than it delivers. It is by turns alarming and alluring, offering impossible insights and riches. But look beyond the titles. Get a sense of both the speakers and the format. For me, these are more important than the topic. An interesting, honest, and questioning speaker can make the most mundane subject insightful and enriching. Similarly, a format that allows you to engage with others is always more useful than one at which you just have to pin your ears back.

2. Talk to people

It’s a truth universally acknowledged that the most fruitful parts of a conference are the bits in between. It’s the networking, talking to colleagues doing similar work in other universities. It’s making connections, learning from others, and sharing your knowledge. I’m not a natural at this, but it’s worth forcing yourself to overcome your shyness. Generally, people are open to being randomly approached. After all, they’re probably desperate to be distracted from the coffee. And talking to them makes you realise that you’re not alone, that many of your frustrations and issues are shared by others, and they might have found ways of solving or minimising them. Learn from them. Alternatively, they might just be an interesting person with a love of good coffee and the films of James Cameron. There’s worth in that too, and you can enjoy a little light relief from the main business of the day.

3. Question the speakers

Once again, this didn’t come naturally to me, and I had to overcome the dizziness and sweating before accepting the frightening roving microphone. However, it does make for a more interesting and engaging experience when you say what’s on your mind and see how the speakers respond. Of course, don’t do the opposite and just question for the sake of it (we’ve all had experience of that), but if something is niggling you, if you feel the speakers have skirted around an issue or you would be genuinely interested in their thoughts, pipe up.

4. Take notes

You don’t have to stenograph everything you hear, but do try to capture interesting points. Your institution might expect you to feedback to others when you return, but even if they don’t, it’s incredibly useful to have something to look back on and remind yourself about what you’ve heard. Better still, write it up as a blog post (I’m always on the lookout for guest posts on mine) or maybe use the conference as an opportunity to launch your own.

5. Use Twitter

There’s a shadow world, a secondary conference that is taking place alongside the real one. Twitter is a wonderful cascading cavalcade of commentary on what’s going on around you. Make sure you use the hashtag for the event and tune in to what others are asking, thinking, or joking about. It makes you realise that you are not alone, and others share the same interests, fears, and humour as you.

6. Look around the city

I know, I know: your hard-pressed institution has paid for you to soak up knowledge, and you feel duty-bound to take in every word. But actually, you’re most likely in a new city and you owe it to yourself to go beyond the conference venue and take it in a little. It might just be nipping out to that hipster coffee shop, but you will enjoy the conference much more if you venture further afield. Cut yourself a little slack and nip out at lunch, or in the evening—or even in that deathly plenary.

For me these six points are the essentials of conference-going.

Anything else is a bonus. Looking at the posters, picking up freebies, winning the quiz are all well and good, but it’s getting access to the insights that are useful for you that will really make your trip worthwhile. And only you can do that, by planning, talking, questioning, and networking. Oh, and by being resolute in the face of so much bad coffee.

Be strong, dear reader, be strong.

Phil Ward is the director of the Eastern Arc regional research consortium.

The post From the archive: Surviving conference coffee appeared first on Research Professional News.

Eligibility to the Humboldt Foundation’s residency programme is not limited by geography or discipline

Top tips

• This year, the programme has a social science theme but welcomes applications from scientists in all fields
• Enthusiasm to engage with researchers far beyond your own intellectual comfort zone is essential
• Applicants must be motivated to communicate their knowledge beyond academia

The Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (AvH) is well known around the world for its prestigious professorships and fellowships that attract leading international scientists and scholars to Germany.

Now, with its six-week residency programme, the AvH also seeks to be a catalyst for new ideas on sharing knowledge internationally. This is the first year for which the programme is open to external applicants and six places are available: three for AvH alumni and three for early career researchers with no previous connection to the AvH. These will join further participants from outside of academia, alongside a creative lead.

The programme runs from June to November 2024, with the residency itself taking place in August and September (participants finalise their joint outputs in the remaining weeks). The deadline for applications is 4 March.

Researchers from any country except Germany may apply. This year’s topic is “power and knowledge”, with particular focus on the exchange of knowledge between the Global North and South.

The AvH seeks applicants from any discipline, and no history of publications on knowledge exchange is necessary.

A key part of the programme will be communicating the ideas developed through the residency with a public audience, as Tonja Klausmann from the AvH explains.

How long has the Humboldt Residency Programme been running?

This is actually one of the newest programmes of the foundation and we are in our third year. So it is still very young and there’s still a lot of experimentation going on.

Is there anything new about this year’s programme compared with previous years?

This is the first year that people can apply to participate. The first two years were our official pilot period and we invited participants. It’s our goal to have a really diverse group, and this is achieved better through an open application. 

What are the key elements you are looking for in applications?

First and foremost, we want people to convince us that they are keen to engage in this cohort. Of course, we also want them to be qualified in terms of having a perspective that’s relevant to the field and being outstanding in their work. But, really, we want people who ultimately are motivated to be part of this experiment. A key aspect of that is the video—we ask applicants to submit a one-minute video of themselves, and that is a really good opportunity for them to show us that they are motivated and also have the communication skills to be part of this programme.

Can you tell me a bit more about the researchers you are looking for?

Three will be alumni of the Humboldt Foundation who have either received a research grant or prize from the foundation in the past. Then the other three—we call them junior researchers—don’t have to have any prior association with their foundation and are either pursuing their PhD or have finished a PhD within the last four years.

The reason for that time limit is that we’re interested in including younger perspectives into the cohort, but also we want to introduce the foundation to outstanding junior researchers. If they are within four years of finishing their PhD, they can still apply for regular funding from the foundation after participating.

So the aim is to have a spread of career stages?

Exactly. For example, in our first year our age range was between around 22 and 60—we had somebody who was in their second year of their PhD and several professors who were already quite established.

It is very much our goal for all the participants to have an equal say in participation. It is also an interesting opportunity for PhD candidates to get a lot of time to work together with professors, and also non-academics, to really go in-depth and be an equal member of the group.

What are the main outcomes that the Humboldt Foundation hopes for from the programme?

There are two main goals that run parallel to one another. The first is to provide a fairly unique opportunity for researchers to learn how to understand each other across disciplines and to create new ideas, and take those back into their regular work. Goal number two is for participants to share the knowledge that they already have—and the knowledge that they gained from working with each other—with the public.

What kind of public communication does the foundation envisage?

Who the public audience is depends on what the participants decide that they have to say. The process is: what do we want to say, as a group? Who has to hear that? And how can we reach those people?

In the past, we’ve had conversations with stakeholders who are in the public administration in Germany, but we’ve also just gone to a park and talked to people who are hanging out. We’ve recorded podcast episodes, published articles, so there’s a lot of room for creativity and we encourage the participants to experiment with new formats.

How important is it for the research participants to have experience of public communication?

We balance that based on where they are in their career. So, naturally, a professor who has been in their job for 20 years, we would expect to have more experience than a PhD candidate. If an applicant can show their enthusiasm for science communication and why it is important for their career, then we will see that as an opportunity to include them in the programme and develop those skills.

What is the monthly allowance and what does it cover?

The monthly allowance depends on the career stage. In comparison to other residences, it’s quite generous.

The call says it is open to all disciplines, but are there any research fields which you would hope to see applicants from?

We really do mean all disciplines. There are some disciplines that are the more obvious choice, generally in the social sciences. But at the same time, the research of the participants doesn’t necessarily have to be on the topic of the residency.

As an example, we have received an application from a mathematician who has a longstanding career of being active in science councils across Africa, and has engaged in science policy, so we consider him to be an excellent potential candidate. Applicants just have to be willing to engage in conversations that might be quite far from what they are used to at their research institutes, but that can be very enriching.

Do they need to have experience of working with partners in the Global South?

No. But it would be an advantage to show that they have experience of working with people outside of their immediate fields; that could be other countries, it could be other disciplines or it could be outside of academia. 

Can you explain what is meant by creating ‘synergies out of existing knowledge’, which is listed as an overriding aim in the call guidance? Are there any examples?

With this topic specifically, anyone who works in international fields has existing knowledge because we all have experience in establishing working relationships across countries and cultures. So by bringing together this really diverse cohort, they will be able to learn from each other.

The most impressive conversation I witnessed during the residency was in 2022, when our topic was social cohesion. We had a lawyer, a psychologist and a mathematician sitting together and talking about what they understood inclusion to mean. It started out with social inclusion, but then maths has a different concept of what inclusion means. That conversation, for all three of them, was a real challenge, but also broadened their understanding of their own work. Those are the kind of synergies that we hope to create between the participants.

The post Opportunity profile: Getting the global conversation going appeared first on Research Professional News.

Or how the study of medieval elephant husbandry can open unforeseen possibilities

On 30 November 2022, ChatGPT was launched. It was met with equal measures of wonder and horror, like it was some kind of real-life Jumanji, but without the promise of a return to normality once the game was over. Great as a quirky toy, not so great when it’s a vehicle for the destruction of the human race. 

Inevitably, commentators were quick to see that our working lives would change forever. Goldman Sachs predicted that two-thirds of occupations in the United States would be affected by AI automation, with between a quarter and a half of workloads replaced.

Question time

And research support? Might research office staff find themselves in that category? There’s been a fair amount of conjecture about this of late, particularly in relation to project development. But such talk often veers into the abstract. I wanted to know: how would ChatGPT handle the type of question I used to be asked quite frequently as a funding officer? 

“Where can I get funding to do this amazing research on medieval elephant husbandry?” I typed. “It has the potential to offer a step change in our understanding of the field.”

It replied in seconds: “Funding for research projects, especially niche topics like medieval elephant husbandry, can come from various sources.”

I felt a little bruised by its tone. It came across as rather brusque and dismissive. However, it did offer me an impressively broad (albeit vague) list of avenues to explore, from internal funds to government grants, fellowships, crowdfunding and, most ambitiously, industry partnerships. “This could include companies involved in historical reenactments, animal care or related fields.” Hmm. Well, possibly. 

I pushed it further. “So what grants could I go for in the UK?” Unnervingly, it provided just the kind of list that I would have produced, and in the same order, including the Arts and Humanities Research Council, British Academy, Heritage Lottery Fund and the Wellcome Trust. It also suggested funders I wouldn’t have thought of, like the Pilgrim Trust—although it might be a bit of work to tack the project’s focus onto Pilgrim’s remit of “preserving the UK’s heritage or bringing about social change”.

But that was in fact covered by its concluding, unsought, but sage advice, once again given almost exactly as I would have: “Carefully review the eligibility criteria and guidelines [and] tailor your proposal to align with the goals and priorities of the specific organization.”

Detailed feedback

Okay. Given these, I asked: “what makes for a successful grant application?” It gave me 12 key points to consider, including writing a “clear and concise” summary, and making sure I include the background and significance, a realistic timeline, and a rigorous and appropriate methodology. It added six further suggestions, such as writing clearly and in a “jargon-free manner”, getting feedback and proofreading it. 

So far, so generic. I decided to take it a step further. “Please provide feedback on this funding proposal,” I asked, before cutting and pasting a six-page case for support.

It responded immediately. “Overall the proposal is comprehensive and well structured,” it began, before highlighting six positive aspects, seven areas for improvement and four “additional thoughts”. They were all valid. 

“So do you think it will be funded?” I asked, cheekily. 

It played a very straight bat: “Predicting whether a grant proposal will be funded is challenging and depends on various factors, including the specific criteria of the funding organization, the competitiveness of the proposal landscape, and the alignment of your proposal with the priorities and goals of the funding body.”

“True. But yes or no: do you think it will be funded?” I replied. “I’m submitting it to the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council.”

It refused to be drawn. “As an AI language model, I don’t have the ability to predict the future or make definitive judgments about specific funding outcomes.” I couldn’t really argue with that, and we bid farewell to each other, with my machine-learning friend offering me “good luck with your proposal to the EPSRC!”

Return to normal

I’d been fully Jumanjied. Things would not return to normal when the game ended, and I could see the end of research development as a profession in the not-too-distant future. As universities seek to tighten their belts, the kind of advice and insights given by us could well be outsourced for free to AI models. 

Other areas of research management may hold out longer, but I think the prognosis is no better. From costings to contracts, from ethics to assessment, I worry that, as AI improves and the models are adapted to fit specific tasks, the need for human interaction, beyond data entry or sense checking (does the study of medieval elephant husbandry really hold such transformative potential for society?) will be limited.  

However, such role redundancy and change has long been a natural part of the working environment. The Goldman Sachs report noted that “60 per cent of today’s workers are employed in occupations that didn’t exist in 1940”. Indeed, the word ‘grantsmanship’—in essence, research development—was only coined in 1961. We will evolve and adapt to new ways of working, and we will discover new areas where there is no substitute for human reasoning and interaction. We just need to be open and ready for them. Brush up on your elephant-husbandry skills, I’d say.

Phil Ward is the director of the Eastern Arc regional research consortium.

The post AI and the future of research management appeared first on Research Professional News.

An appendix to the two-part series on spotting and sharing info on research funding calls

Having discussed how to and who should find funding in part one and sharing funding info in part two, I’m going to conclude with this appendix—not part three of two, my editor insists—on how to summarise an individual funding opportunity.

As a primer it’s probably worth reading through this article from the archive on how to read a funding call. In that piece I cover what elements you should expect to see in a funding call, what to look for, where to look for key elements, and what I called “minesweeping”. This is the detailed study of a funding call to identify anything that might explode and sink a bid if not spotted and dealt with early. Summarising a funding call isn’t so much about defusing the mines as much as identifying them and drawing attention to them as part of the summary.

One size doesn’t fit all

You might think that a good approach to summarising funding opportunities would be to use a standard template or pro forma. While I have hit on a  rough structure that generally works, I’ve never yet found a simple template that’s suitable for summarising all calls. They’re just too varied, too diverse, and different researchers will need different elements highlighted for them.

I’ve drawn inspiration from the five W’s and H: who, what, when, where, why and how. Most news reports will answer all those questions—or the ones that are not irrelevant—in the first paragraph, before pulling back for more context and detail. I’ve written about this in more detail in an earlier article on attacking the summary section of application form.

It’s not an exact read-across for research call summaries, but these questions focus the mind on only the most important information from the busy researcher’s perspective. And that’s key. We’re writing for an audience—a busy audience who (as discussed in part two) are probably only skim reading our summary.

Unlike journalists, our aim is not to draw readers in, but to allow them to self-filter out. If there’s a reason why this funding opportunity isn’t for them, I want to tell them as soon as possible. A good order is to lead with the biggest filter… what’s the single biggest reason why this call might not be suitable. And then what’s the second biggest, and the third, and so on.

Rough structure

I normally lead with a sentence or two covering: call title; deadline (specifying if it’s an outline); amount of money available; project duration. Some readers can filter themselves out on title alone, others on deadline (if it’s too soon), others on amount of money (not enough, or more than they need or are ready to apply for).

Next, I’ll try to say something about why this might be a good call to apply to, based on what I know about the researchers’ interests. I’d probably try to pick out a key detail from the call (perhaps it’s a short application) or refer to a previous conversation or topic or research question that they’d mentioned to me.

Then, the opposite—why it might not be a good fit or why it might be difficult to apply. This is where it’s worth mentioning that they need partners from industry, or from specific countries, or that they can’t cost in their overseas partners. Or if there’s only a small number of awards, or career stage eligibility restrictions, either stringent or vague.

Sometimes those negative elements might be so important as to deserve promoting to the opening paragraph. Sometimes the negative elements are so negative that it warrants placing the negative paragraph before the positive one—especially if I think it’s a long shot and/or I want to steer researchers away from applying unless they’re really keen.

Finally, I try and pick out the essential elements of the call remit and scope. I’ll try to very briefly summarise this in a few key words in the opening section and perhaps expand in either the positive or negative paragraphs.

In the call documentation, there’s usually a couple of paragraphs that outline the remit or call aims or themes. Sometimes the assessment criteria are the best guide to what they’re after, but other times those are bland and generic and best omitted at this stage. I’m usually looking for a section I can cut and paste, either with no or minimal editing for clarity and brevity. With practice and experience, it’s possible to reliably identify the key section or sections (which may or may not be consecutive) that get to the heart of what the call is all about. Finding and including that section and putting that at the end of your summary rounds it off nicely.

Keep it lean

Once you’ve done all that, it’s tempting to add in all the less important details. Resist that temptation. A competently written funding call will have a lot of moving parts and a lot of rules, and regular calls tend to build up lengthy FAQ documents. Although you could in principle put these less important rules at the very end of your summary to be read last, I think that, at this stage, mostly just eats up everyone’s time and probably a fair amount of space.

Remember that you don’t need to re-write the full call. It’s already been written. Certainly, details of complex equipment cost-sharing rules are important, as are rules about whether you can cost in PhD studentships, but they’re rarely go/no-go call elements. Call context and rationale is useful, but it’s rarely vital information. Most funding calls have elements of blurb and blah, and EU funding is the worst for it. It is the key elements that are the dealbreakers. Everything else can be read by curious researchers in the full call. Thanks to your summary, they’ll already know that this is a good use of their time.

Finishing touches

A well written summary should conclude with two further pieces of information. First, it should include details of the full call, emphasising again that this is merely a summary. That could come via a link to the call page and/or by attaching the full call document(s) to the email. It’s worth remembering that funders don’t always do a great job of making it clear that the document(s) they link to do have more information than is on the call webpage.

Second, there needs to be what comms folks call a ‘call to action’. What does the researcher interested in this opportunity do? Again, sometimes that’s obvious (email the person who sent it to you), but sometimes you might be planning an internal briefing event or a networking and idea generation event, perhaps depending on levels of interest.

There’s no substitute for practice when it comes to summarising funding calls. But it’s also worth working with colleagues… this is something that research development professionals often don’t do often enough, largely because of time pressures.

I would argue that there is value in making time with a colleague to hone summary writing skills. Identify a few calls to summarise independently and then come together to compare notes and learn from each other. This will be instructive as to what details you each pick out as most significant, and how you structure your respective summaries.

Adam Golberg is strategic research development manager (research growth) at the University of Nottingham. He tweets @Cash4Questions and blogs at socialscienceresearchfunding.co.uk

The post Finding funding: How to summarise a research call appeared first on Research Professional News.

Officials, advisers and grant winners talk through one of Australia’s most important health research funds

Next year, the Medical Research Future Fund will reach its 10th anniversary. Set up in 2015, it was intended to turbocharge Australian funding for health research through a long-term investment.

Research projects are paid for through interest on the fund’s value, which hit A$20 billion in 2020. Currently, the MRFF is doling out A$650 million annually, making it second only to the National Health and Medical Research Council’s (NHMRC’s) annual spending of around A$900m.

A merger of these two major funds was mooted last year and the ministry overseeing them, the Department of Health and Aged Care, is conducting a review.

For now, though, understanding how to apply for MRFF funding is crucial for Australian health and medical researchers. The fund has a busy calendar of calls, with 11 currently open and 17 more upcoming this year.

Funding from the MRFF is used to target specific national health priorities. These priorities are set every two years, based on public consultations carried out by the Australian Medical Research Advisory Board (Amrab). The priorities sit within the overarching MRFF strategy, which is provided on a five-yearly basis, also by Amrab.

Background reading

At a webinar held in late 2023 on how to address the MRFF’s research priorities in grant applications, the deputy chair of Amrab, Caroline Homer, underlined the importance of putting the time in to understand the fund before embarking on a bid.

“I know we’re all in a hurry when we’re writing a grant,” Homer said. “But I encourage you to spend a couple of hours on the MRFF and the NHMRC websites just looking at the documents, looking at what you’re doing, who you’re writing for, before you hit that keyboard.”

MRFF calls are themselves run by the Health and Medical Research Office of the department of health. HMRO chief executive Masha Somi also urged applicants to get to grips with the documentation ahead of bid-writing, highlighting the MRFF Grant Opportunity Guidelines as being crucial.

“We always encourage researchers to take a close look at the guidelines, especially section 1.3, when considering whether and how to apply,” Somi said, advising applicants to “focus on the objective and intended outcomes that are set out”.

Missions critical

She also encouraged going back to the MRFF’s eight research missions and their implementation plans—which cover areas ranging from cancer and mental health to Indigenous health—to understand what any single funding opportunity is trying to achieve.

Maree Timpson is the former chair of the MRFF’s ‘Million Minds’ mental health research mission expert advisory panel. She explained that, when developing funding opportunities for the mental health mission, the panel put weight behind boosting capacity in Australian research.

“A key priority of the MRFF is strengthening health and medical researcher capacity and capability,” Timpson said, adding that in the implementation plan for the mental health mission “you’ll see the development of research workforce as being very important”.

“In developing the grants and the plan, we also took that into account,” Timpson said, indicating the importance of including early-to-mid-career researchers.

Aligning with expectations

Jacqui Macdonald won an MRFF grant for a research project on paternal mental health. Having put together a successful application, she stressed the importance of aligning with key expectations outlined in the research mission implementation plans.

For Macdonald, these were “knowledge generation, alignment of that knowledge to a critical issue, and partnerships”.

“We needed to demonstrate in our application the link between our knowledge generation and a strategy that would address the critical health issues,” she explained. Given that her project was on mental health among fathers, Macdonald said that her project partners were Movember and Healthy Male, “with whom I was already able to demonstrate emerging collaborations”.

Macdonald also explained that her team “tended to use the language of the guidelines and the principles in the application, and we did this so that the reviewers would be left in no doubt that we were giving these full consideration”.

Timing it right

Another winner of an MRFF grant speaking at the webinar was Michael Berk from Deakin University, who leads a project on mental health clinical trials in Australia. He said his team was “mindful of MRFF strategic priorities” including consumer research, translation and commercialisation when bidding for funding.

He also emphasised the importance of creativity and certainty about the research idea underpinning any grant application: “We worked very hard at kicking the tyres of the actual fundamental idea underpinning the grant because that is where you’re going to live or die.”

According to Berk, getting the timing right for a research proposal is crucial. “Unquestionably, if you catch the wave too late, you’re just going to be dumped into the mud,” he said, using a surfing metaphor.

“You have to time your idea with where the field is ready and where the process and programme is ready for your idea.”

Top tips

In terms of the actual application, Berk advised that the first page is far more important than the last. “If your page one is not great, you’re dead in the water,” he said.

“You’ve got to have an opening with a hook, stating what your knowledge is, what the gaps are, what’s the critical need. You’ve got to talk to the who, why and what of your grant: what’s your goal, what’s your rationale, what’s your objective. You need to define your aims very clearly, your aims and hypotheses and your payoff.”

Homer, the deputy chair of Amrab, also gave some overarching advice on how to hone good grant applications.

“Get lots of peer review from your friends, from your colleagues, from people outside your field as well—don’t wait for your feedback at a grant review panel,” she said.

And in terms of MRFF grant reviewers themselves, Homer underlined the importance of making applications easy to read.

“Reviewers now include consumers or lived-experience advocates,” she said. “So, yes, you have to write [in] technical language, but make it easy for the reviewers.”

The post So you’re new to…the Medical Research Future Fund appeared first on Research Professional News.

Part two of two on how to spot and share info on research funding calls

In part one of this two-parter, I looked at direct funder-to-university or funder-to-researcher communication of research funding calls. That is, how to source funding opportunities and who should be doing it. In this second part, I’ll look at how to effectively share and disseminate opportunities within a university or academic unit. I’ll weigh up the pros and cons of some possible methods to do this, but first, I want to set out five key considerations to help guide the choice of approach.

1. Busy people rarely read their emails properly 

This is partly due to a lack of time, partly due to reduced attention spans, and partly due to people reading on phones. If you’re anything like me, you skim read your emails and then assign a priority level for reading them properly. Maybe. Lowest priority gets Instant Deletion. Slightly higher priority is Read Later. Only… later may never come, and messages mentally categorised this way can just sink without trace into the email quicksand.

2. Research calls are difficult to summarise effectively

Calls contains lots of variables: value; duration; deadline; (in)eligible applicants; (in)eligible partners; costing rules; application documentation; application process. And that’s before we’ve even started thinking about topics and scope and remit, which can be anything from very open to very niche. And the funder’s own information can run the gamut from very clear to ‘call designed by international committee’ levels of baffling.

3. Research calls are full of jargon

If I were to tell you that the BBSRC sLoLa call pays 80 per cent fEC for projects costing £2 million and £20 million, some of you would nod your heads sagely. Others wouldn’t have any idea what I was talking about. Do you know the difference between Wellcome Trust and Wellcome Leap? Between NIHR and NIH? Between the European Innovation Council and the European Innovation Ecosystems? Go to the top of the class if you do, but remember that many—probably most—researchers will not. Like all jargon, it’s a great shorthand for those who understand it, but it’s largely impenetrable for those who don’t.

4. The common law of business balance applies

One formulation of this law goes: “Good, fast, cheap. Choose two.” As for ‘good’, as I suggested above, it takes experience and insight to properly summarise and de-jargonise a call. But ‘fast’ matters because some calls are launched with very little notice. Start just a few days behind rivals and you may find that the best spots on the most promising consortia are already taken. So if you’re attempting to do funding comms on the cheap, then it’s a question of working out which you prefer: good or fast?

5. Messengers matter

Who sends emails, to whom, and how they’re framed determines a lot about how (and whether) they’re read and received. A message from a trusted colleague of the type “saw this and thought of you because of [good reason]” sent to you and your regular collaborators will get more attention than something fired to the whole school without context by someone whose name invokes a certain sinking feeling.

With these elements taken into account, let’s now examine the possibilities for informing others. There are three main ones.

1. Everything to everyone all at once

Years ago, I asked why we were copying the research director in the arts faculty into an email about a breathtakingly niche biosciences call. The answer was along the lines of… well, you never know. No, sometimes we do know. The value to the university of some ridiculously lucky outcome from poorly targeted emails is less than the cost of spamming senior university research leaders. Partly, they’re busy, but also, they’re going to stop reading your emails. Every duff email you send lowers your credibility and damages the reception of your more accomplished efforts.

Even with more selective distribution lists, just forwarding funder emails or newsletters has limited utility. In a UK context, UK Research and Innovation funding call emails aren’t bad but are often missing key details or important context, so just forwarding them will only get you so far. It adds to the volume of email, and people will stop reading. This strategy may be cheap and fast, but it’s not good.

2. School or faculty funding newsletters 

I prefer this to the previous strategy, because it consolidates all those emails that no one reads into a single email or newsletter… that no one reads.

There’s a place for newsletters, but only if they’re regular and are more than just a dumping ground for poorly ordered information. They’re good for calls with broad eligibility criteria and likely cross-school appeal, and where there’s enough time to apply so that a delay until the next newsletter doesn’t matter too much. I have also used the newsletter strategy for opportunities that might be of interest to someone, but I wasn’t sure who. Newsletters are less good for time-sensitive calls, for calls that are narrow or niche, or calls which are especially hard to summarise that might benefit more from a conversation.

Remember that a newsletter could be usefully expanded to become an annual call timetable for those funders and calls with predictable funding cycles. If you don’t have a bespoke funding calendar for your research area, talk to someone about getting one produced and shared.

When I last worked for a specific school, my newsletter was weekly, and my headings went  something like this:

(i) New calls

(ii) Still open (featured in the last newsletter)

(iii) Niche calls and longshots

I’d also structure the newsletter with one-line summaries of each opportunity at the top, longer summaries (three paragraphs max) and then a link to the full call below.

This was good, (fairly) fast, but far from cheap if you costed my time putting it together. A more occasional newsletter would obviously score better on cheap, could be good, but suffer on fast. A more regular newsletter that wasn’t properly edited or curated would be fast and cheap, but not good.

3. Tailored targeting

This is the gold standard. Having a friendly neighbourhood research development manager looking out for funding opportunities across a specific remit, and then sending those to individual researchers or research groups along with a summary, commentary, and next steps for anyone interested. Such bespoke emails can still be backed up with newsletters for broader or more generic opportunities. This is good, it’s fast… but it’s not cheap. But this is what’s needed to be competitive across a broad range of funders.

Tailored targeting and high-quality newsletters also serve to enhance research culture and the research environment. They’re a regular reminder about the availability of external research funding and the support available. I’ve lost count of the number of replies I’d get to my newsletter emails asking me about something completely different—obviously that email was the prompt.

All of which leaves one unanswered question: how best to summarise calls for maximum effectiveness and impact? I think a third part of this two-parter—which my editor insists will have to be called an ‘appendix’—may be necessary.

Adam Golberg is strategic research development manager (research growth) at the University of Nottingham. He tweets @Cash4Questions and blogs at socialscienceresearchfunding.co.uk

The post Finding funding: Sharing opportunities appeared first on Research Professional News.

Part one of two on how to spot and share info on research funding calls

You can’t be what you can’t see, and you can’t win research funding that you didn’t know was available. You also can’t win research funding that you ‘sort of’ knew about, but not in the right way or in the right format, or at the right time. And, worse, if you’ve misunderstood a research funding call or had it miscommunicated to you, you risk wasting a lot of your precious time barking up the wrong tree.

Every research funder and institution should have clear and timely communication of research funding opportunities as a priority. As a funder, you want your opportunity under the nose of every eligible researcher with suitable ideas, and you absolutely don’t want to have to receive, review and reject applications which aren’t competitive or aren’t in scope. As an institution, you want your researchers to know exactly where to go to advance their research ideas.

And yet… this doesn’t happen as smoothly as it should, so what to do? This first article will focus on direct funder-to-university or funder-to-researcher communication—how to source funding opportunities and who should be doing it. In part two, next week, I’ll look at internal comms—how to effectively share and disseminate opportunities within a university or academic unit.

Get the basics right

The obvious place to start is to identify the most important research funders for you and your academic unit and sign up for their newsletters. This is straightforward for most major funders, though for some charities you can end up accidentally signing up for their fundraising newsletter.

However, funding environments can be complex. This is certainly true of the UK, which is so complex it took me two long-ish articles to summarise it. There’s variation globally, but even so, running an international funding opportunities database such as that offered by Pivot-RP (formerly known as Research Professional) is a viable business. If you’re reading this, your institution has a Pivot-RP subscription, which you can use to search for opportunities and to set up regular funding summary emails. The parameters both for the funding search and for the summary emails can be tailored to your interests.

I’ve used Research Professional/Pivot-RP for most of my career, and I’ve curated searches for every school I’ve supported, as well as a more general search for charity funders over a certain value when I moved to a central role. At the same time, I’ve tried to sign up for every funder newsletter that I can, but Research Professional still finds opportunities (especially international opportunities) that I’d otherwise miss.

It’s worth making sure you’re using Pivot-RP as effectively as possible, and it might be worth tweaking your filter settings if you’ve not looked at them for a long time. It’s possible to have them too broad—bringing up too many false positives—as well as too narrow.

Whose job is it?

How involved should individual researchers be, and how much should they instead just rely on their friendly neighbourhood research development manager to find and filter opportunities? I think the answer depends on researchers’ institutional context and how much researchers need funding.

To what extent can you, as a researcher, rely upon your institution to do the finding and filtering for you? Research development managers or equivalent are good at reading and understanding funding calls and distilling the essence of them. This article about their contribution says more about why they’re typically better at reading calls than researchers and can do it much more efficiently. However, they’re usually not researchers, and they’re also not you. They’ll be looking for opportunities for a much broader group of researchers. They can and do miss things or miss people out.

How much time, realistically, do you have spare to spend? Yes, you can sign up for a lot of email alerts but, realistically, will you be reading all those emails you’re opting into? Or are you just signing up for more clutter for your inbox? It’s very easy to spend a lot of time looking for funding opportunities, and the less experienced you are, the longer it takes.

If your support is brilliant, you can probably delegate funding searches. If it’s inadequate or even non-existent, you’ll need to do it all yourself, or find some other solution within your research group. Though if that’s the case, I’d question how serious about research your institution really is. If you’re somewhere in between (the case for the vast majority of researchers in the UK, at least), my advice would be to sign up for newsletters and alerts only from your key funders. Beyond this, returns start to diminish quite quickly.

I’ll say more about internal dissemination of funding opportunities in part two.

Social media

Many funders have a social media presence on X (formerly Twitter), and many use it to supplement their email communications. This used to be a good thing, as it was an additional means of communication and a quick way to keep up with what funders were doing.

Now I’m not so sure, and I’ve got concerns about how some funders are using X instead of rather than as well as email communication, or they are offering more or faster information or context than is available elsewhere.

To mention a couple of funders I’ve been tracking, my impression is that the Wellcome Trust sometimes tweet opportunities before they appear in newsletters. However, in mitigation, today’s Wellcome Trust is probably better than most other funders at giving advance notice of calls within their priority areas—not always the case historically—as well as having a laudably predictable annual cycle of discovery award schemes.

Turn to the UK’s new Advanced Research and Invention Agency (Aria) and a different, more problematic picture emerges. The chances are, that unless you’ve been following the agency, and a few key Aria individuals and programme directors, on X, there’s every chance you’ve missed out on key information, or got it later than others. Most of the information is also on their website, so it’s in the public domain. But if you didn’t know to look, you wouldn’t know.

Platform decay

The advice I used to give was to set up Tweetdeck with different columns for different funders and use that to keep track of activity. But Tweetdeck-style functionality is no longer available as part of the free product. I’m not averse to paying a fee for services that deserve financial support, but neither the price nor the product nor the record of the current owner appeals. Writer Cory Doctorow described this process—not unique to X—as platform decay, or more memorably, as ‘enshittification’.

It’s still possible to bookmark the profiles of accounts in your web browser for easy reference, but it’s much more time-consuming to search through. And although I’ve tried to do this, the reality is that it has not worked, and I’ve not kept it up.

I don’t want to fall into the trap of thinking there was ever a golden age of Twitter. It always had problems, it’s just that they are orders of magnitude bigger now. My view is that research funders should be thinking long and hard about using X to transmit more, better, or earlier information than they’re sending out via email newsletters or equivalent. It’s increasingly hard to justify given how much harder it is to keep up.

Adam Golberg is strategic research development manager (research growth) at the University of Nottingham. He tweets @Cash4Questions and blogs at socialscienceresearchfunding.co.uk.

The post Finding funding: Sourcing opportunities appeared first on Research Professional News.

AI models have immense positive potential for many scientific fields, European University Association hears

As we enter 2024, there will be considerable focus on the value of artificial intelligence—of its potential to revolutionise computing, how AI systems might alter the way we work, and how it can impact culture and life itself. There will be debate on everything from becoming an AI-powered business to AI’s impact on ethical judgement. Its effect on scientific practice is certainly contested and will also be the subject of much debate.

Anna Scaife, professor of Radio Astronomy at the University of Manchester, and one of the inaugural AI fellows of the Alan Turing Institute, the UK’s national institute of data science and artificial intelligence, has a clearer idea than most of what an AI future might hold.

During a workshop on foundational AI in scientific research, held in December for members of the European University Association, Scaife shared her views.

Building the foundation

Foundational AI is a term that relates to ‘foundation models’—systems capable of a range of general tasks like text synthesis, image manipulation or audio generation. The language model ChatGPT is arguably the best known foundational AI system.

For Scaife, foundational AI holds untapped potential for scientific research due to its ability to process and categorise data much faster than is humanly possible. In particular, she argued, the use of foundation models built specifically for scientific purposes could offer possibilities for expediated scientific advancement and multidisciplinary work.

However, at the workshop, Scaife warned that “one cannot just adopt AI approaches from the computer science literature that are not specialised for scientific purposes”. Instead, she argued, specialised foundation models must be built from the bottom up. But that is no easy task.

“The downside of these models is that they are computationally very expensive,” Scaife said. The final training run of GPT-3, for example, is estimated to have cost somewhere between $500,000 to $4.6 million and, Scaife added, the company behind the model estimated that the cost doubled roughly every three-and-a-half months.

Added to that, in scientific research, there are few datasets with labelled entries that the AI model can draw from readily online, which makes building bespoke foundation models for use in science even trickier.

However, Scaife continued, building AI models is an excellent way of organically developing interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary projects between different natural sciences, as well as with computer science.

Widespread application

Once you have a foundation model, this may then be used as a base model for developing more specialised downstream applications via fine-tuning. And in contrast to foundation-model building, Scaife said, “This is computationally really quite cheap.”

The low cost means that once the foundation model for data processing in a field is developed, it can easily be adapted with smaller datasets by people in specific fields, Scaife continued, and there is therefore a democratising effect as scientists of all stripes gain access.

At this stage, even scientists without access to large infrastructure could potentially use AI for scientific analysis just by uploading datasets from their laptop, Scaife said. It would become possible for scientists to undertake exploratory analysis of datasets that would previously have been too large to treat in this way.

Scaife explained that in her field of astronomy, observations, and thus their collected datasets, have been growing exponentially. It is increasingly difficult, therefore, for individual astronomers to undertake more conventional types of analysis manually. Building adapted AI models is a way to overcome that obstacle, she said.

Scaife joked about this. “There might be enough graduate students in the world [to perform manual analysis], but there is probably not enough coffee, so AI is a very attractive, and in fact necessary, mechanism for extracting the scientific information from our data in a timely fashion.”

Considering the volumes of data many researchers are working with now, Scaife continued, without the help of AI it may soon become impossible to extract any impactful findings, “certainly within the scope of a PhD and really within the scope of a career”.

Reciprocity

Foundational models of AI built for scientific research also have the potential to contribute to wider AI methodology in a reciprocal way, Scaife concluded, and particularly with regard to bias.

Bias has been a large point of contention across AI. Since foundation models learn from datasets, any bias in the original dataset tends to get reinforced. But Scaife could give a first-hand account of seeing that process countered. By incorporating underlying knowledge about observations in astronomy, a project that Scaife worked on was able to remove a bias from a standard deep-learning model and correct it, she reported, so that the resulting data catalogue was not also biased.

Scaife said that by making use of prior knowledge in their field, “Science also has a role in developing new AI methodologies.”

The post How AI can change science for the better appeared first on Research Professional News.

Why research managers and academic leaders need a holistic approach when choosing funding opportunities

Over the last decade, major national and international funders have tended to favour big project or programme grants necessitating multi-partner bids—and there is little sign of a reversal.

Applying to these schemes takes lots of work, drawing academic and research-office time and resource away from other activities. Clearly a strategic judgment on whether to apply is necessary. When should universities and departments take the plunge? Ragnar Lie, a senior adviser at Universities Norway, had some suggestions in this article published in January 2021.

Competition for external grants is the name of the game for funding research activity in Europe and beyond, both at the national scale as well as through EU framework programmes for research and innovation. From the point of view of funding organisations and governments, this is done by design so that only the best projects and the best research groups win.

But how to play the game from the point of view of research organisations? It takes two to tango, and if the overall aim is to increase the quality of research, how can an ambitious research unit make the best decisions on what funding to target?

My answer is to only go for the money that will contribute to your unit’s academic and thematic goals. It is always tempting to go for the big money rather than the good money, but to misquote Frank Zappa, “we’re [not] only in it for the money”.

Focus on quality

To put this idea into practice, I suggest using a simple fourfold table (pictured) that helps categorise a potential project as to whether it is in line with your units’ research strategy, as well as whether the project will finance itself or require additional contributions from your own budget. The best scenario is for a project to add to the academic strategy and to be well-financed. The worst scenario is for a project to be underfunded and a bad academic fit.

The basic premise behind this model is that external competitive funding should be seen as a means to improve academic quality and focus, and there can be a trade-off between money and academic focus. If your research unit encourages its staff to apply for as much funding as possible, disregarding whether the projects add to research quality in the long run, you risk ending up less focused and ultimately less attractive to the best researchers and the most important funders.

Of course, for this model to work, you need to know what your academic focus is. Without a coherent research strategy—an ambition for where you want your research unit to go over the coming years—you will not be able to tell the potential suitable projects from those who will lead you astray.

Strategic development

This way of thinking developed gradually during the 1990s, while I was managing an initiative from the Research Council of Norway on a new programme for research on the EU, which later became the Arena Centre for European Studies at the University of Oslo. The ambition was to build a world-class research centre on European integration studies, starting from scratch.

What part of the broad research field of European studies could we possibly contribute to in a serious way? Together with the first small group of professors and young researchers, the first Arena research profile was made. Once in place, this profile was our common and shared guide to look for funding, as well as research staff, that would take the new centre in the direction of its academic goals.

At Arena, balancing potential academic return with economic return and how to make synergies with ongoing projects when developing new applications has long been a part of its DNA. Almost 30 years later, after numerous EU and nationally funded projects, this small unit of 30 people from 11 countries continues to contribute significantly to the field.

Holistic approach

For the system to work, you need a professional research administration office that not only helps researchers scout for possible funding opportunities but also assesses the economic sustainability of potential projects. Remember: no money is for free. Most externally funded projects require some kind of top-up money, and you need dedicated and professional research administrators to tell which projects will need additional internal funding.

While determining the economic return of a potential project is a job for research administrators, determining the academic return falls to the academic leadership. The job for the leadership and administration working together is to organise a process for balancing these two priorities. You should end up with a portfolio of projects which add to the research strategy, as well as to a balanced and sustainable budget.

In the end, you need to see all your resources combined as one portfolio, encompassing projects, funding, people and infrastructure. Too often, external funding can be seen as just that—external, an add-on. On the contrary, external funding, and the people and infrastructure funded by it, should be seen as a core means to meet your goals. 

The post From the archive: Choose the good money over the big money appeared first on Research Professional News.

The second of two articles on fostering valuable interdisciplinary collaborations

Last week, in my first look into what can be done to encourage more and better interdisciplinary research, I asked why we would want to foster interdisciplinarity in the first place and discussed some easy-to-make mistakes when we act to do so.

In this second article, I’ll make some positive suggestions for interdisciplinary events, and finish with a few thoughts about long-term, people-based solutions to interdisciplinary challenges.

So then, events. Here are six suggestions for organisers, starting with an initially dispiriting, but ultimately hopeful one.

1. Lower your expectations

Because, as I said last week, interdisciplinary research is hard, we shouldn’t expect a particularly high hit rate as organisers or attendees. If we define success as a major new collaboration leading to publications and/or funding and/or impact case studies, we’re likely to be disappointed. But it’s probably better to define success as potential collaborations explored, and sensible decisions reached, about whether to pursue them.

2. Bigger and broader isn’t the same as better

Resist the temptation to try to run the largest, longest and most complex event possible. It’s great to be inclusive, but if you’re too inclusive and go too broad, there’s a risk of a lack of common ground or common language. Longer events are harder for everyone to attend, and I’m pretty sure that people are less likely to bother at all if they must arrive late or leave early. A programme of smaller, shorter, more focused, more precisely tailored events will be more cumulatively effective than a splashy showpiece event.

3. Hone the event pitch

A good pitch needs to attract the right people but also repel those who will find little value in it. I’ve seen too many events that have little more than a title (usually one open to multiple interpretations) and something vague about researchers from all disciplines being welcome. Proper pitches, definitions, explanations, remit statements, goals and expected outcomes are all important. Get input and feedback on drafts of the event brief, especially from those in the target disciplines. Your friendly neighbourhood research development manager may be able to help.

When an invitation to an interdisciplinary event arrives, every researcher will be thinking about the opportunity cost. If I go to this, what won’t I be able to do, or what will be delayed as a result? Because academic workloads are high, and because interdisciplinary research is hard, organisers need to do everything they can to help researchers reach the right decisions about attending or not. Every negative experience means that researchers are less likely to attend future events.

4. In-person isn’t necessarily better

The post-pandemic received wisdom is that in-person networking and idea-generation events are better. But having attended several outstanding online events, I’m not so sure. Online events are obviously more accessible, both in terms of actual attendance, and in terms of being recordable and shareable afterwards. Sharing the recording with a timeline for the different talks enables those who can’t attend to go straight to talks of interest.

The other big advantage of online events is the chat function. Participants should be encouraged to use the chat to comment, ask questions, share resources and so on. Yes, the chat can end up getting monopolised by one or two people, or drifting off into irrelevance, but with good luck it can be incredibly useful and allow multiple parallel conversations to go on at once. Of course, an in-person event can include opportunities for open networking in a way not afforded online, but there’s at least an argument to say that the chat function could be a viable alternative.

5. Thunderbolts from lightning (talks)

I’m fond of blocks of short presentations at interdisciplinary networking events. I used to like the PechaKucha format, but I’m now of the view that they add additional and unfair challenges to less confident public speakers. Blocks of five-minute lightning talks are now my preferred option, perhaps with one or two questions, at a maximum. That’s enough time to give a flavour and attract potential collaborators, but not so long that anything overstays its welcome. Obviously, this needs strong chairing and clear briefings for speakers about the appropriate level of detail given the expected audience. They should be calls for collaboration and input on plans for future work, not presenting past results.

6. Don’t forget to follow up

The lack of follow-up is probably the biggest and most common oversight. If the event was online, go through the chat and gently remind people of any actions they committed to. It’s easy to forget the moment you log off the call and get distracted by urgent and/or annoying emails. At the end of an event, there ought to have been some sense of next steps, and it’s good to remind people of what those are. Even if it’s just a prompt to follow up on discussions.

Investing in people

Events tend to treat disciplines as separate and in need of bringing together. But what if we could instead create permanent and lasting bridges between them? How could we do that?

One way would be to have more joint appointments between schools and faculties. This would be hard, for the same reasons that interdisciplinary research is hard, but with added financial complications and different teaching curriculum needs and research priorities. Joint PhD studentships are easier, at least for the supervisory team (not always for the PhD student), but can be a great way of cementing and building upon potential areas for collaboration.

And then we could look at empowering the boundary-spanners, go-betweens and foot-in-both-campers we already employ. Whether because of unusual career paths, vociferous intellectual curiosity, or a mind that craves breadth as much as depth, there are researchers who are good at interdisciplinary research. Offer them roles as interdisciplinary ambassadors, either roving or assigned to a particular disciplinary boundary.

As well as being the first name on the signup sheet for any interdisciplinary event, they can also be tasked with looking for themes and topics for events, and looking for introductions and recommendations to make. Research development managers are often tasked with doing this, but many will lack the academic background and credibility to do all of it.

Formal recognition of the role as part of workload is vital for it to work, I should add, and success in it should count towards potential promotion. What is this if not research leadership?

Have I just accidentally reinvented the school or faculty or college research director role? Perhaps I have. However, as I said, I don’t think this kind of role need be undertaken by a senior research leader. Also, throughout my career (not necessarily right now), I’ve regularly been frustrated by the lack of time that some role holders have for this kind of creative, visionary, collaborative work. Either because there isn’t enough time allocated to the role, or because too much of it is eaten up with research management rather than research leadership.

Ultimately, though, however we choose to support and promote interdisciplinary research, it’s worth being clear about why we’re doing it, and what we hope to achieve. Otherwise, how will we know if it has worked?

Adam Golberg is research development manager (research growth) at the University of Nottingham. He tweets @Cash4Questions and blogs at socialscienceresearchfunding.co.uk.

The post Interdisciplinary research: events and encouragement appeared first on Research Professional News.

The first of two articles on fostering valuable interdisciplinary collaborations

I recently started a new research development role, and part of it will relate to fostering more and better interdisciplinary research. The bad news is that I haven’t cracked that challenge yet, but the good news is that I’ve got a few thoughts to share that might be helpful.

In this first article, I’m going to ask why we would want to foster interdisciplinarity in the first place and talk about some easy-to-make mistakes when we act to do so. In the second article, I’ll be making some positive suggestions about potentially more productive way of working.

Tough stuff

First, it’s important to acknowledge that interdisciplinary research is hard. If you, your research group, your school or your institution are still wrestling with the issue, this is probably why. In most disciplines, trying to work across disciplinary borders is a bit like trying to escape the pull of gravity.

At an individual level, sitting between two or more disciplinary stools can make it harder to compete for academic jobs, especially in early career stages. When it comes to grants, if your work falls between two funders or two committees within the same funder, you shouldn’t be disadvantaged, but if neither panel has the complete picture, it’s hard to see how you won’t be.

Similarly with promotion and progression, if there’s a narrow view of the kinds of journals that you ought to be publishing in to get promotion, and those journals have a narrow view of what they ought to be publishing, you have a problem.

And then there’s the sheer amount of effort needed to work across disciplines. You don’t have to become an economist to work with economists, but you need to understand the key ideas and paradigms, and to be able to ask questions that economists can grapple with. And then understand their answers.

The challenges of interdisciplinary research may have been far from the minds of the authors of that much-cited song cycle ‘Just Enough Education to Perform’ (Jones et al, 2001), but that’s always stayed with me as a good summary of what’s needed to work with colleagues in another discipline. That ‘just enough’ education isn’t easy to acquire and comes with its own opportunity costs.

Given that monodisciplinary research is generally easier and quicker, there should be good reasons to want more interdisciplinary research, especially if we’re prioritising internal resources to support it, as many institutions do. What are they?

Magic words

I’ve discovered six magic words that I can deploy to extricate myself from misconceived initiatives or even shut them down entirely: what are we trying to achieve? It’s such a good question to ask because means can easily get mistaken for ends, or morph into them.

Is interdisciplinary research an end in itself? Some people may argue that, but I’m not convinced. It seems more likely that we value it and want more for other reasons—not least a certain tendency to innovation, the opening up of new avenues, even shifting the paradigm.

If the speed of scientific discovery really is slowing down, perhaps there’s more vitality and possibility in the interdisciplinary. Maybe some disciplines or fields are slowing, becoming stale. In areas where the number of researchers is set by demands of the undergraduate curriculum rather than the size of research challenge, might there be over-fishing?

That’s a deficit model, but there might also be positive motivations. We might think that advances in one field—theoretical, methodological, technological—shed new light on others. I’m not alone in wondering what advances in AI and in quantum technologies might do in fields where their potential is barely understood yet. And that’s just two examples.

Or are we in favour of interdisciplinary research as the only way to address real-world challenges? Wicked problems to which complete solutions cannot be found within a single discipline and require collaboration and cross-pollination to address. In this paradigm, interdisciplinarity is not a response to a deficit, not merely the harbinger of new opportunities, but rather the only game in town for previously intractable problems.

Potential pitfalls

I’m going to outline four ways in which interdisciplinary research—or more accurately, our efforts to support it—can go wrong or at least produce disappointing results. Not knowing why we’re carrying out the research or what we’re trying to achieve is the first and most obvious, but there are others.

1. The marriage of convenience

This sorry affair can develop when researchers from very different disciplines have a shared interest in a common theme. But they end up working in parallel, with separate programmes of work which don’t interact, inform or influence each other in any significant or sustained way.

Certainly, there are plenty of topics and challenges that cry out for interdisciplinary approaches, but unless we’re careful, they induce marriages of convenience that ultimately provide cover (and possibly funding) for monodisciplinary activities. The loveless marriage is unlikely to be especially fertile, even if both sets of researchers are content pursuing their own hobbies and interests. If we don’t watch for—and develop—points of intersection and influence, this is an easy trap in which to fall.

2. Country and western

In the classic musical comedy ‘The Blues Brothers’ (Landis, 1980), a bartender at a music venue is asked what kind of music they usually have, and she replies “Oh, we got both kinds. We got country and western.”

I’m reminded of this scene when certain researchers try to present their collaboration as interdisciplinary when outside observers might question the validity of the disciplinary distinction. A microeconomist working with a macroeconomist. An area studies researcher working with a historian of that same area. OK, there’s an argument for this sort of thing and the quality may be high. But if you’re running internal schemes, it may not be what you want to spend your money supporting.

3. Hitting psychology students with pendulums

This is the opposite problem to the C&W, and I’ve named it after a classic XKCD cartoon. The cartoon’s legend describes a competition between professors “to get the weirdest thing taken seriously under the label ‘interdisciplinary programme’”. The panel highlights the false assumption that because interdisciplinary research is good, then really interdisciplinary—radically interdisciplinary—research must therefore be better. Well, it ain’t necessarily so. In fact, if we end up funding research for novelty value, we can end up prioritising the Ig Nobel over the Nobel.

4. The empty middle

One of my very first attempts at interdisciplinary facilitation generated two research ideas across two different tables, including everyone in the breakout session. So didn’t I do well?

As it happens, no. Although everyone had had a perfectly lovely time, each table generated a research idea that sat at the intersection of interests of attendees. But the average doesn’t exist, no-one was especially invested, and while everyone graciously agreed to continue to be involved in some capacity, we’d just generated some ‘zombie projects’ (see this article for a definition. It’s good to be inclusive, but coming up with workable projects also means narrowing them down. We can’t include everyone.

Those are four traps of interdisciplinarity. In the second part of this series, I’ll be a bit more positive and make some suggestions of techniques to foster valuable interdisciplinary research. Many of you are probably already doing much of what I’ll suggest, or not doing it because it’s too hard to get agreement and/or resources. But I may have a few tips, tricks and twists that could be helpful.

Adam Golberg is research development manager (research growth) at the University of Nottingham. He tweets @Cash4Questions and blogs at socialscienceresearchfunding.co.uk

The post Interdisciplinary research: the prize and the pitfalls appeared first on Research Professional News.

The first of two articles about taking on responsibilities as an early career academic

For those who stay in academia after completing a PhD, gaining a firm foothold on the academic career ladder, let alone climbing it, can be tricky. But progress can be helped by taking on responsibilities that are additional to a ‘main job’ and yet essential to the running of academia and indeed science and scholarship more widely.

However, as Justine Firnhaber-Baker, professor of late medieval history at the University of St Andrews, related in two articles published in October 2021, it can feel daunting to take on such roles. She hoped that feeling could subside with the acquisition of some knowledge, and in this first article, Firnhaber-Baker set out to explain what PhD supervision—one of the first extra responsibilities that early career scholars will take on—is all about and how it can be performed effectively.

It’s something every early career scholar knows but finds that few discuss, and even fewer offer advice on: the more established you become, the more you’ll be invited to take on new responsibilities. These responsibilities may include supervising postgraduates, leading a research group, or editing publications—all exciting, demanding and sometimes frustrating roles that require sensitivity, as well as knowledge and skill. But, truth be told, although they enable you to influence your field and advance professionally, the prospect of ‘stepping up’ can seem a little daunting.

This two-part series aims to boost your confidence by demystifying some of the opportunities and challenges offered by the transition to mid-career. In this first part, I will talk about how to create effective supervisory relationships with PhD students. Next week, I’ll turn to external collaborations and editing. Hopefully, these articles will benefit not only you but also those around you.

For PhD supervision, I think there are four key challenges when performing this vital academic function.

1. Defining roles and responsibilities

Clear communication is the bedrock of effective supervision, and the first step to establishing that is to define your role and responsibilities. Whether your own experience as a supervisee was ideal, a nightmare, or somewhere in between, you should consider how it influences your expectations now that you’re on the other side of the desk. Your student, meanwhile, may be coming to you with only a hazy idea of your role and may well be intimidated by you. Remember that you will loom much larger in this person’s life than they will in yours.

Both of you must be clear that the student has intellectual ownership of the thesis. Unlike at undergraduate level, where the instructor provides a body of knowledge for the students to master, the job of a doctoral student is to make an original contribution to knowledge. You are there to help them navigate the scholarship and to critique their arguments and evidence, not to answer every question. I tell my students that I am their guide, their interlocutor and their advocate. I owe them my attention and my honesty, and I expect the same in return.

2. Day-to-day practicalities

I meet my students at least every other week in the first months to ensure they are conversant with the scholarship, that they are amassing research materials, and that they are integrating the department’s postgraduate and research communities. As time goes on, the time between supervisions becomes longer. Towards the end, we might only meet when a chapter is ready for discussion. I ask my students to write a short report after each supervision that outlines what was said and what the next steps are before the next supervision. This helps serve as a jumping-off point for our next meeting and facilitates accountability.

Especially in the first year, it is wise to have agreed checkpoints to keep the student focused. Most departments require some kind of first-year evaluation or defence of the thesis proposal. At my institution, this is a draft chapter that is critiqued by faculty external to the supervisory team. In addition to helping students define their projects, this process helps staff to assess progress and spot problems in the supervisory relationship. It also gives students a chance to raise any difficulties that aren’t being addressed by supervision.

3. Support during tough times

In the three or four years it takes to complete a thesis, all manner of things can go wrong—from a beloved dog’s death to a once-in-a-century pandemic. Even without such disasters, students have fallow periods, moments of intellectual panic and writer’s block, and it can be quite challenging to know what, if anything, to do in these situations. I find it helpful to remember that my job is not to solve these problems, but to facilitate writing a thesis under the circumstances that present themselves

Always be sure that the student is physically and psychologically safe, but be clear that your relationship is a professional one. The most helpful thing you can do is to strategise how to complete the thesis given the situation at hand. A couple of examples of a strategy-based approach would be drawing up a detailed 6 to 12-month plan with checkpoints for completing aspects of the thesis or forming a writing group to provide community and support, as well as accountability and inspiration.

4. Readying for completion

Not all of your students will finish their degree, and that’s okay. When a student is ready to quit, it has usually been long apparent that things were not working out. The conversation will come as a relief to both of you. You can still support the student by writing references for potential employers, or facilitating the award of a lesser degree.

On a happier note, doctoral success can be nearly as satisfying for supervisors as for students. Be sure to celebrate with your students. Express your pride in them out loud and in so many words, and remind them that your commitment to them hasn’t ended: you will write recommendations for them, critique their CVs, nominate them for prizes and fellowships, and pass on job opportunities.

In time, some of your students will leave academia for greener pastures, but some will become your colleagues and collaborators. A few may surpass your accomplishments.

PhD students can be a lot of work and worry, but they can also be your most important intellectual legacy.

The post From the archive: Stepping up to supervise appeared first on Research Professional News.

Some hold-ups can be averted, but some just can’t

Among the various photos rotating as my desktop wallpaper on my work PC is a screenshot from the television show The Good Place. The caption says: “Okay, shouldn’t take long. Between an hour and, um, 11 months”. As a contracts manager, the statement resonates. People always ask me how long it will take to finalise a contract and my answer is usually just as vague and unhelpful.

Why won’t I give a definitive answer? What is the difference between a contract that takes an hour and one that takes 11 months, or even longer? In this article I look at what goes into getting a contract negotiated and finalised, what influences how long this takes, what you can do to speed things up, and what factors can be outside both your and my control.

Information is key

First question: do I and my counterpart at the other organisation have the information that we need to draft or review a contract? This might seem like an incredibly basic question, but we often stumble at this first hurdle.

I don’t just mean have you told me the project title, dates and budget (though of course I will need these); I mean what is the project about, what are its aims and objectives? What is the relationship between us and the other parties? A contract does not exist in a vacuum, it is there to reflect a piece of work and describe a relationship.

Some of the most difficult and protracted contract negotiations I have are when the lawyer or contracts manager for a commercial party fundamentally misunderstands this relationship. They have either sent me their model agreement—which they use as a ‘one-size-fits-all’—or they have reviewed the contract that I sent them with their own standard terms of business in mind, which are almost certainly not designed for research projects. To make those contracts work, it takes a lot of time and effort.

This isn’t just me being pedantic and wanting the contract to be absolutely perfect (and I do recognise that contracts managers can sometimes veer toward perfectionism over pragmatism). I’m talking about the things that actually matter to the university and to my academic colleagues. A company’s model agreement will often deny or severely restrict the right to publish. Or it might automatically treat us as their data processor regardless of the actual roles of the parties, which has implications for how—or if—you can make use of the data from your research.

It might seem counterintuitive but, in my experience, the easiest contract negotiations that I have are often with big pharma, while the hardest tend to be with small companies. That’s because big pharma (generally) understands research and the university environment, whereas a small company will often be in unfamiliar territory.

Sometimes it’s only when we get to the contract that we discover that the company you’re working with has a completely different understanding of the meaning of “publication”. While those of us working in universities know exactly what we mean when we say this, it can set alarm bells ringing in the corporate mind. If you want to publish, the contract should not be the first time they learn of this.

So talk to your company colleagues. Tell them what it is that you want to achieve from the project. Don’t assume that they will know what your priorities are as an academic, and what matters to the university.

External forces

But enough about you. What about me? Let’s assume that you have given me all the information I could possibly need. Why am I still holding your project hostage?

The thing about contracts is that they will always involve more than one party. It’s not just me who has to review and comment on a draft, and follow the internal processes my university dictates. There will be at least one other person at one other organisation who must do exactly the same thing.

The contracts that I work on usually have multiple parties, sometimes up to 10. So that’s 10 people I have to get to respond to me and 10 opinions I have to consider. All it takes is for one person not to respond and the contract will be delayed. And there’s nothing I can do about it beyond sending increasingly frustrated and desperate emails to the other party.

We have no control over what happens somewhere else, so if that other organisation wants to take seven weeks just to sign a contract that we have already agreed, I cannot make them do it faster.

Many academics believe that their organisation is uniquely bad at sorting out contracts. I know, I’ve seen the emails: “Getting my contracts team to respond is like pulling teeth”. I’m here to tell you that this is not the case. We are all slow. And it’s not just universities. Companies also have their own layers of bureaucracy that make them a lot less agile than we might imagine.

And then there is the question of workload. Like academics, professional services staff in universities are over-stretched and under-resourced. During the years I worked in universities, I became adept at starting emails with “thank you for your patience” or “owing to workload, it will be X amount of time before I’m able to review this”. It’s just as frustrating for me as for the academics I work with, though I’ve been lucky to have extremely understanding colleagues.

The nature of the game

Even when everyone is responsive, contracts generally do involve a certain amount of back-and-forth negotiation. I wouldn’t be good at my job if I accepted everything that was sent to me just for the sake of expediency.

Perhaps we contracts managers are being overly dramatic in imagining ourselves as Gandalf bellowing “you shall not pass!” but if we return to the idea that a contract embodies a relationship, then it needs to reflect that relationship as accurately as possible. Personally, I think that if you’re going to invest a lot of time and energy into a working relationship, then it is worth spending some time capturing that in the contract.

Even something as simple as spotting something is missing in a contract will take time to correct, but it’s nearly always the case that if we don’t fix it now, we’ll have to fix it once the contract is up and running, at which point it will likely have become a pressing issue. In such instances, getting the contract signed as quickly as possible is a false economy.

So finally, I hope any academics irritated by the ongoing delay in getting their partnership contract finalised will understand why a certain message from me is forever recorded in one university’s project management system.

The message was in response to a principal investigator and finance team as they kept asking what was happening with the contract. “I anticipate it will be signed in the next week or so,” I kept saying. But eventually, like Papa Smurf when he finally realises he has to tell the truth after being repeatedly asked whether the journey is much further, there came one final “is it much longer now?” until I had to reply “Yes, it is!”

Stephanie Harris is senior contracts manager at the National Institute for Health and Care Research. She writes here in a personal capacity.

The post Why do research contracts take so long? appeared first on Research Professional News.

RPN Live: How to champion anti-discriminatory policies in the face of resistance

As attendees at the Research Professional News Live webinar on the topic heard, in the last few years there has been genuine progress on diversity, equity and inclusion measures in research.

But there have not been nearly enough DEI-promoting measures taken. As Jakob Feldtfos Christensen, director of Diversiunity—a Denmark-based consultancy dedicated to making diversity work in research—said in the opening presentation: researchers are being put at risk by the ongoing lack of consideration for minoritised people.

This point was also made by Katherine Deane, a university access ambassador and associate professor in the school of health sciences at the University of East Anglia, who cited reports on institutions’ “unsafe and even unlawful” failure of provision for their disabled staff. “We are finding basically that the processes are so poor that we are placing people actively at risk,” she said.

In summary, there is still much work to be done. But what can those acting for positive change do in the face of pushback? This question brought forth some compelling replies from the webinar’s panellists.

Here are four pointers that emerged during that discussion.

1. Take opportunities where you see them

Dina Stroud, programme director at the US National Science Foundation and a leader of the Growing Research Access for Nationally Transformative Equity and Diversity (Granted) initiative at the National Science Foundation, said that one of the things she learned early on while working to further equity was getting to “know who to avoid”.

She expanded: “You learn to find the advocates and you work with those folks. You do what you can and recognise the limitations of the situation but keep moving. You just can’t let it stop you.”

Deane agreed, saying it makes sense to work with allies who are already onside rather than try to win over hardened holdouts. But she offered a caveat: don’t waste time with people who are only superficially allied.

She said: “I have stopped working with quite a number of allies who intend good things but once I start asking for more than the bare minimum, they start to say ‘Oh, that’s too much!’ At that point I tend to back away.”

2. Humanise the rhetoric around DEI

The first pointer should not be taken to mean that diversity advocates should stop trying to win people over, panellists agreed. Parveen Yaqoob, deputy vice-chancellor at the University of Reading and chair of the UK’s Athena Swan Governance Committee, spoke of negative reaction to a race equality review she led at her university. In response to criticism that this initiative would be “pushing left-wing ideology”, Yaqoob responded by recounting from personal experience what was at stake.

In those conversations, she brought up her “personal experience growing up in the 1970s and ’80s in a very racist area and some of the professional challenges that I’ve had with respect to racial equality”.

Such an approach “did break down some barriers”, Yaqoob said, even if it wasn’t a magic bullet against resistance.

Deane also talked of how she advocated for change by incorporating her personal history. She said: “I have to be very clear with people that I’m a disabled researcher and I have very specific needs because without these accommodations I cannot do my job…These are not special treatments, these are not extras, these are not advantages…Without these accommodations I wouldn’t be working now; we would have lost my voice; we would have lost the voice of a lot of disabled people.”

3. Recognise that some pushback is legitimate

Feldtfos Christensen focused on pushback from the communities that DEI initiatives are meant to serve. This can arise, he said, because institutions often seek to start a DEI drive by collecting data. Yet, after years of discrimination and exclusion, people within those communities often have little trust in those institutions. The logical response, Feldtfos Christensen said, becomes: “If I don’t trust you, I’m not going to tell you who I am.”

Deane summed up the grounds for this rational distrust well: “The disabled community and other minoritised communities have been promised many things over many years and very little has come of that.”

4. Put action first

Sapna Marwaha, deputy chair of the UK’s Association of Research Managers and Administrators and chair of that organisation’s DEI Advisory Group, said it was important to resist relentless calls for more data from people in power to justify the need for inclusive initiatives.

She said: “I don’t think we need to do anything more to prove [systemic discrimination]. The problem exists and the places where I’ve managed to make the biggest difference are the ones that already acknowledge that.”

Indeed, there seemed to be unity across the panel that many DEI initiatives were so well-evidenced that there was now no excuse for them not to be implemented—and only when they were would it be acceptable to ask those from minoritised communities to talk about themselves.

Feldtfos Christensen said: “The first step as an institution [should always be] to take action because you don’t have the trust from minorities from the get-go. You need to show minorities that they can actually trust you then you can start to ask them about data about themselves.”

Similarly, Deane said that only once her university had carried out renovations and modifications to make buildings accessible to disabled people could it show that “all those mission statements, all those good intents and good policies, actually had concrete outcomes. The trust [of disabled researchers] started to be built and at that point we could have deep discussions with people about disability access.”

For Marwaha, the question of building that trust fed into another discussion about creating a welcoming environment. She said: “I sometimes get asked [by institutional leaders], ‘How do we signal to people that we are safe?’ The reality is that when you [present] a really homogenous team it becomes clear that really you are not.”

Again, here, the answer lay in putting action first—in diversifying institutional leadership. Without this, Marwaha said “It’s very clear to somebody from a minoritised group that [yours] is not an environment that rewards people from different backgrounds.”

The post Diversity, equity and inclusion: Pushing back against pushback appeared first on Research Professional News.

The second of two articles on the run-up to grant or fellowship interviews

Research funding interviews are serious business and require strong preparation. Last week, I wrote about how those supporting bids at an institutional level can best help candidates in the run-up to a funding interview.

Now, in the concluding article of this two-parter, I’m going to move on to what steps the candidates themselves can take to prepare for the big day.

There’s lots of generic advice about preparing for job interviews and much of that advice is relevant, but I’m not going to repeat it here. Instead, I’m going to take it as read and try to focus on specific issues related to research grant interviews. I am, however, going to repeat a subheading from the previous article.

Practice, practice, practice

In part one, I recommended three practice interviews and explained why. I said that your practice interviews should be scheduled as soon as the funder’s interview dates are known, even if you don’t yet know if you’ve been invited. As an applicant, the more uncomfortable the thought of all this makes you, the more you need that practice.

In an ideal world, you’d be offered three practice interviews—but if not, you should push for them. You’ve put a lot of effort into the bid and if your institution is serious about supporting you and your research, it’s not too much to ask. Not least because if you’re successful, you’ll be paying it forward for years. You’ve done well in getting an interview, and you (and your team if it’s a collaborative bid) deserve support.

Here are five points to consider in both solo and team interviews.

1. Remember that you’re a contender

Interviews are time-consuming and expensive, and funders don’t ask no-hopers. Even if aspects of the reviewer comments weren’t great, you have a chance to address and defuse those comments. Maybe you start a goal behind, but you can pull it back.

2. Find out about the panel

Some funders publish the names of panellists and it’s worth finding out about their backgrounds. Questions will usually be led by two or three panel members and you might be able to guess which ones. But don’t obsess over them; your panel may be different on the day, and your audience isn’t just those two or three because the whole panel usually votes or scores. You will probably find that not everyone on the panel will be an expert in your field and some may not be academics at all. Make sure your answers and especially your presentation speak to those panel members, too.

3. Be prepared for inarticulate interviewers

For all the focus on interview skills for applicants, there’s nowhere near enough focus on interviewing skills for panel members, whether that’s for jobs or for research funding. Most people are not great at interviewing, mostly because they’re untrained or nervous. A good interview is a conversation; a bad one is a series of monologues.

Panel members will probably ask questions that are confusing, unclear, poorly structured, meandering, unfocused or verbose. Not unlike that last sentence. Nervous panel members tend to want to blurt all their questions out at once. You can and should ask for clarification if you need it or proffer an answer to the first part of the question and ask to return to the second and third in a moment. If you’re working in the spirit of giving them the information they requested, it’s fine to ask about the level of detail the panel is looking for in your answer, if you’re not sure.

4. Keep your answers clear and concise

It’s easy to keep talking and end up waffling. It’s much harder to give short, sharp, concise, clear answers and then trust that you’ve done it and have the confidence to stop talking. A good interviewer will interrupt you and gently close you down once they’ve got the information they need. But as I said, most people are not good interviewers and will instead listen and nod politely while you talk your chances away. Some solo interviews are quite short, so don’t squander your time.

5. Stand up for yourself and your ideas

You shouldn’t face aggressive, demeaning or belittling questioning. You should expect rigorous and thorough challenges to your ideas, but that’s entirely different. In that spirit, don’t be afraid to respectfully disagree with points made by reviewers, or assumptions underpinning questions. It’s great to acknowledge valid concerns and useful suggestions or the opportunity to clarify something you left ambiguous in the bid. But don’t try to compromise your way to getting funded if you don’t really agree with a criticism. It’s unlikely to work.

Team interviews

There are additional challenges for team interviews, which are mostly attempts to answer this question: who’s going to do what?

There is no universal right answer to that question, although there are some wrong ones. For example, don’t fall into the trap of thinking everyone has to answer every question. I’ve seen this done in practice interviews and it’s excruciating.

Happily, there are better ways to allocate response time—one model is ‘the conductor’, where the principal investigator will take all the questions and point the baton to prompt team members for answers but will probably do most of the talking. Another is ‘the jazz combo’, where the most appropriate member of the team speaks up. Answers tend to be spread much more evenly across the team, and you get something that’s more natural and conversational.

The jazz model is instinctively my preference, but it’s not always the right one because it’s harder to do well. There’s a case for adopting the conductor approach when you have a larger team (more than three), when it’s a virtual interview, when you don’t have natural chemistry or when team members are particularly nervous or your principal investigator is very good at interviews. It also suits some project models—if the project is more ‘PI and collaborators’, rather than ‘three equal partners’, the conductor could be the best fit.

By ‘chemistry’, I’m not talking about whether you like or respect each other—given you’re signing up to work together, I’m taking that as read. It’s more about whether you’re comfortable with each other and can confidently read each other’s body language and intuit feelings and intentions. If you’ve not spent much time together as a team, don’t be surprised if you need to work on this.

There are hybrid models, too—‘jazz combo with conductor ready to step in as needed’, for example. Whatever you choose, you should discuss and agree so everyone knows what role they’re playing. If you have a conductor (or, ahem, a semiconductor), they need to feel empowered and supported to play that role.

So much communication is non-verbal. If you have that natural chemistry, you may already read each other well, but you can agree your own codes. In person, a glance or an intake of breath or a hand slid forward on the desk can indicate that you have something to add. For virtual interviews, you can give each other subtle signals—physically raise your hand in the bottom of your frame, touch your chin, lean forward. Shift backwards if you don’t want to talk. There’s a lot that can be done with practice.

Ultimately, this stuff is what you’re trying to develop during practice interviews. You won’t be able to give the strongest possible answers unless you’ve sorted out your internal dynamics.

Achieving balance

Whatever model you adopt, you still want a balance of contribution. It doesn’t look good if only the PI speaks or if it’s not obvious why a team member is even there. Different areas of experience and expertise will determine who is best placed to respond to most questions, but areas such as training or research culture or staff development will probably need more active dividing up. It also doesn’t look good if training or equality or patient involvement questions are only answered by the most junior team member.

However carefully you divide topics, it’s likely that you will be asked a question that either crosses remits or you’ve not thought about, and it’s fine to take a moment to consider who should answer. You’re not on live TV, so a few moments of ‘dead air’ while you consider your collective response is a price worth paying for a better answer.

Finally, whether it’s a solo or team interview, remember that funding interviews are always a massive, massive deal. I’m not aware of any trivial or minor funding schemes that use interviews. So make sure you plan something nice for afterwards. The interview will be an intense experience and you need to look after yourself. Try to avoid dwelling on any questions you didn’t answer as well as you could; you’ll have forgotten all the ones you aced. For a team interview, it’s probably a good idea to have a debrief to help process what happened and how it went. It’s too soon for a detailed postmortem, but think about decompressing together. Then decompress some more with friends and family.

Adam Golberg is research development manager (research growth) at the University of Nottingham. He tweets @Cash4Questions and blogs at socialscienceresearchfunding.co.uk.

The post Preparing for funding interviews: How to help yourself appeared first on Research Professional News.

Part one of two on the run-up to grant or fellowship interviews

Funders vary in how frequently they use interviews as a means of decision-making. But as a rule of thumb, the larger a grant or more career-defining a fellowship, the more likely a funder is to deploy interviews.

Research funding interviews are therefore serious business for which preparation is essential. But how best to prepare? In this first article, I will focus on how to approach interview preparation at an institutional level—that is, for those arranging or assisting with preparation. I will turn to how candidates can best approach interview preparation in part two, next week.

Before I begin, it’s worth specifying the types of research interview. The first, I’m going to call the ‘solo interview’. This is usually for a fellowship or personal award and there’s only one applicant. Second is the ‘team interview’, usually for major awards where two or more members of the team are invited to attend. There are slightly different considerations for each, but more similarities than differences.

Practice, practice, practice

Whether solo or team, it makes sense to schedule at least three practice interviews. The first is an opportunity for the candidate to experience interview pressure, to make mistakes early, get rid of any rust and identify areas to work on. The second is a chance to learn the lessons of the first and put them into practice, perhaps even experimenting a little. The third is a chance to improve further, build confidence and even enjoy the experience. It’s possible to get by with two; sometimes the third can feel like it’s added less value. But if nothing else, it builds confidence. One isn’t enough. It’s just not.

It’s especially important to schedule multiple practices for team interviews for two reasons. First, they’re more complicated. You’ve got three or four people to answer questions, you want the most suitable person to answer the question, you want to spread answers around and you want to do so with fluency and confidence. Even if your team is blessed with excellent interpersonal chemistry, this needs practice.

Second, many senior researchers tend not to have much recent experience of competitive interviews. Most competitive job interviews happen early in their career. Promotion procedures don’t typically involve interviews, and after a certain level of seniority I’m led to believe that recruitment is more like a chat or negotiation than a high-stakes, pressured, competitive interview.

I recommend using the term ‘practice’ rather than ‘mock’ for these interviews because they’re not fakes or facsimile versions. The best way to think of them is as batting practice. The interviewees get to spend some time in the nets or in front of the wicket, dealing with different kinds of pitches or deliveries (depending on whether you want to take this metaphor to baseball or cricket).

With that in mind, here are my seven tips for effective institutional preparation.

1. Plan for success

If the scheme specifies interview dates, applicants should block book those dates in their diary and research office colleagues should start scheduling practice interviews. Applicants should get these in the diary even before they know for sure they’ve been invited. It’s better to cancel than scrabble around for dates at short notice. With a team interview, availability is going to be a challenge even if you start early, and the kinds of people you want on the panel are also likely to be busy. There’s significantly less value in a practice interview with absent interviewees, to the extent that I usually wouldn’t bother without the whole team. My ideal is one per week leading up to the real thing.

2. Spread the workload

With team interviews, if one or more of the interviewees is from another institution, ask that institution to arrange a practice interview. If you’re leading, overall responsibility rests with you, but why not call on the resources of your partners to support your joint endeavours? Most universities will find it relatively easy to organise one; it’s finding that second date or second panel that’s often trickier.

3. Follow the format

Stick to the format of the official interview as much as possible. If it’s in person, practise in person. If there’s a presentation, keep it the same length. The only thing I’d vary is to allow more time for questions if it’s a short interview. Brief everyone involved to stay ‘in character’ as interviewer or interviewee. Don’t break the fourth wall; the more real this feels, the better. Maybe it feels awkward or artificial but acknowledging that makes it worse and the interview less effective.

4. Allow plenty of time

I try to get 90 minutes for a practice interview, regardless of the actual format. It normally takes a practice panel 15 minutes or so to get comfortable and agree lines of questioning. There’s normally a presentation (say, 10 minutes) and you should allow at least 20 minutes at the end for feedback and discussion. If you don’t need all of it, you can always finish early. That leaves about 45 minutes for questions. Don’t be tempted to allow questions to overrun into feedback time, because you need time to have a proper, two-way feedback discussion. Don’t just fire off bullet point notes without discussion or opportunity to respond or ask further questions.

5. Don’t overload the panel

If you’ve got 45 minutes for questions, that’s 15 minutes for Q&A for three interviewers. That’s not much. If you have potential panel members with relevant academic expertise, that’s great, but remember this isn’t a viva and it’s not a conference. If you can find academics who know enough to ask challenging questions, that’s good enough to make it a worthwhile exercise. This is also a great development opportunity for young researchers; they tend to enjoy the pretend power and take their role very seriously.

You should also think about involving non-academics. Research development managers should be able to come up with good questions, and if you have specialists on, say, research culture or researcher development, why not invite them to ask questions on those topics? It’s also a good idea to have an observer across all three practice interviews—an observer is better placed to spot things than panel members, who are preoccupied with asking questions.

6. Brief the panel thoroughly

This is not internal peer review. The application cannot now be changed; it’s just a matter of preparing for the interview. Remember—this is batting practice for the interviewees. Panel members need to throw them a variety of pitches to have a swing at. You’re not trying to…catch them out [sound of metaphor collapsing]. The practice interview should finish with confidence enhanced, not diminished.

One recurrent question is whether to ask aggressive or hostile questions in practice interviews. Judging by some horror stories I’ve heard, it used to be common practice to ‘rough up’ interviewees at real interviews to see how they responded. Those days are hopefully behind us, leaving us free to distinguish between tough, difficult or probing questions asked respectfully (fine) and questions that demean, bully or belittle (not fine). Some might argue that it’s better to prepare interviewees for this possibility and appoint a ‘bad cop’ on the panel, but I think this may do more harm than good by adding unnecessary stress.

I normally come up with a list of indicative questions to help panel members. But what mostly happens is that academics tend to agree how to parcel up broad areas of enquiry that they’d each like to ask about. I’d just tell them how long they have for their questions and come to each of them in turn. Make sure there’s a panel chair to keep an eye on time, who could be a research development manager or an academic.

7. Question overlap is fine

Not every question at every practice must be new—in fact, it’s often better to ask the same or similar questions at a later interview in the hope of getting a stronger answer. On the other hand, it’s worth thinking about a wildcard question for each practice—something the interviewees won’t have planned for. Questions like ‘How will you know if you’ve succeeded?’, ‘What keeps you awake about your proposal?’ or ‘Why would it be a mistake not to fund your project?’

In summary, if you’re serious about research, be serious about supporting interview preparation. Given the amount of work that goes into getting an application this far, I’d argue that a university that is serious about research should provide high-quality support for interview preparations. It’s the final hurdle…and we should do whatever we can to help researchers clear it.

Adam Golberg is research development manager (research growth) at the University of Nottingham. He tweets @Cash4Questions and blogs at socialscienceresearchfunding.co.uk.

The post Preparing for funding interviews: How to help others appeared first on Research Professional News.

Why centring on a mighty foe in research grants can pay dividends

Hollywood has long loved using science as a major driver in its storytelling. Scientists themselves have, however, been less keen to use storytelling techniques in communication, often because of the perceived conflict with objectivity.

But times are changing. Many researchers are now waking up to the idea that, used in a proper way, storytelling is a mighty ally when communicating science. It can engage and inspire the reader in a way that a mere listing of facts and findings will never do.

There are now several books, courses and websites dedicated to educating scientists on techniques that novelists and screenwriters use, which can be deployed in a variety of scientific contexts. Although the number of story components in these guides varies, there are two recurrent ones: the main character and the key message. The main character (or protagonist) is often the object of the scientific study—its topic. The key message is how the study has changed the main character. Translated to grant writing, the key message tells how the study will increase knowledge of the studied scientific topic. When applied properly, storytelling shows how a study may advance science in an inspiring way.

These guides nearly always suggest making the main character the centre of attention. But, as Hollywood well knows, the straightforward development of a character rarely makes for an appealing story. It takes another vital component: conflict.

Having read many grant proposals that take the easy road of character development—proposals that were often rejected—I realised that these proposals lacked a key element: an antagonist. That is, one or more seemingly insurmountable obstacles that the main character must conquer. In my mind, the best project proposals revolve around a barrier, hindrance or hurdle that the scientific projects aim to overcome—a villain that must be slain.

I would argue that you should consider placing the villain in the spotlight of your project proposal.

How to identify the villain

The villain of a grant is the thing that stands between the present and a better future. It might be the shortcomings of an existing method, a threat to a natural habitat, an incurable disease or the drawbacks of using current medical therapies. It is a barrier that the proposed project sets out to overcome.

The villain can be brought into focus by answering these two questions:

• What is the core reason for the problem that my scientific field is struggling with?

• Which exact barrier does my research need to overcome?

You might find these questions academic and detached from major societal challenges as presented in, for example, Pillar II of the European Union. Nevertheless, I think it is still crucial to home in on the villain and not the result of the villain’s actions.

I’ll take antibiotics resistance as an example, as I recently assisted with an application in that field. The resistance is a societal challenge, yes, but it is only the consequence of what the villain is doing. The villain itself lies behind how the resistance arose in the first place; we develop antibiotics to target physiological processes essential for bacterial survival. But we know from the Darwinian principle of evolution that bacteria will eventually evolve to avoid such crude treatments. There you have your villain, the fact that bacteria—due to the process of evolution—will get around antibiotics’ mechanism of action sooner or later.

Applying these two questions helps the antagonist take shape in whatever field of research you are working in. This will give you an easier time explaining the grand problem that your research project is aiming to overcome. And, most importantly, it will give reviewers an easier time understanding it.

How to kill the villain

Once you’ve identified your villain, you then need to outline why your project is the perfect one to destroy it. For this, you should bring forth what others have done and how you will distinguish yourself from them.

• Why have previous attempts to solve the research questions failed?

• What is different in my approach? Why will I succeed where others have failed?

Returning to the antibiotic-resistance example, the first question is already answered as we identified our opponent: we are developing antibiotics based on a fundamentally wrong principle. We are targeting the wrong systems in the bacteria—the ones that keep the bacteria alive. How could this be done differently? In the research proposal, the idea was to design novel antimicrobial agents that disrupt a genetic system in a bacterium that allow it to sense when it has entered a host. If the novel drug could prevent this system from being turned on in the first place, the bacterium would remain in a sort of dormant and non-pathogenic state.

You can see how clear initial identification of the villain allows us to answer the first question instantly. And answering the second one provides the very foundation of your grand idea, one that reviewers will be more likely to buy into.

Does it work?

Who am I to say if this technique—and storytelling in grant writing—works? Well, in the example above, the researcher got their project funded. OK, this is a sample size of n=1 and the researcher’s idea was great in the first place, but I think the ‘kill the villain’ approach helped the reviewers see the vision of the project more clearly.

More widely, an increasing number of foundations ask for evidence of impact for proposed projects and, in my experience, research ventures generating knowledge for the sake of knowledge are less likely to attract funding. By having a distressing problem at the centre of a grant proposal, the applicant ensures that their proposal will not be placed in that category.

I am a full-time funding adviser and a spare-time novelist. Whether I am assisting with writing proposals or novels, I put a lot of emphasis on the villain. Having a strong opponent simply makes the story more engaging. Great stories may have a mighty hero, but it is often the ability to crush the villain that makes the hero great.

And so it will be with your next grant bid, I hope. Godspeed!

Philip Hallenborg is a funding advisor in the faculty of science at the University of Southern Denmark

The post Kill the villain! appeared first on Research Professional News.

How to tackle the problems faced by the ‘squeezed middle’

Mid-career researchers face significant challenges in developing their careers, and these are increasing as the pressures and expectations within modern higher education continue to mount.

This won’t come as a surprise to any of us who work in universities. As a development manager, I was faced with the frustrations of trying to find funding for researchers who had tipped over the line from early to mid-career. Dedicated schemes dry up, and those who are newly-minted mid-career researchers are thrown into the turbulent and competitive waters of the open calls, having to fend against much bigger and more experienced fish.

At the same time, they face challenges common to us all, with the additional pressures of workplace demands, unrealistic expectations and changes within their personal life such as parenting, caregiving and moving home. They are the epitome of that hoary old cliché ‘the squeezed middle’.

Up until now, however, evidence of the challenges faced by mid-career researchers has been somewhat anecdotal. At Eastern Arc, we wanted to get a sense of the scale of the problem and understand the many forms it takes. To do so, we commissioned the Women in Academia Support Network to undertake a survey and recommend actions we need to take to address these challenges.

The resulting report paints a depressing and in places shocking picture of the current situation. It suggests that the barriers faced by mid-career researchers are “pervasive and entangled in their complexity”, and that an academic’s mid-career is a “pinch point” at which they face a “competing number of additional roles, responsibilities and activities”.

Report authors Kelly Pickard-Smith, Helen Ross and Amy Bonsall analysed 254 responses to a survey open to academics at Eastern Arc universities and beyond. Narrative questions within the survey elicited a total of 2,147 written responses, and 13 in-depth qualitative interviews were conducted.

Findings

The results of the research are disturbing. Over 80 per cent of respondents reported experiencing barriers to their mid-career progression, while more than half reported experiencing or witnessing structural issues or discrimination that have hampered their own or others’ success. Other findings included:

• 98.8 per cent felt mid-career was not clearly defined by universities.
• 62.8 per cent reported that their university didn’t provide training specific to mid-career researchers.
• 79.9 per cent reported that they felt universities did not provide a good level of career support at mid-career stage.

Frequent challenges related by mid-career researchers included:

• Unclear parameters at individual and institutional level about duties and success criteria.
• Workload and time stress.
• Lack of training and mentoring.
• Limited funding or grant opportunities and a problematic ‘reimbursement culture’, where they have to pay large sums upfront for conference attendance, for example, but are only reimbursed later.
• Contract disparities arbitrarily applied, where contract type or job role precludes staff from applying for career-enabling opportunities.
• Structural barriers and discrimination affecting women who are returning from maternity leave or staff of any gender who are working class, disabled, non-UK nationals or racially marginalised. These groups experience greater rates of attrition, career stagnation and precarity.

Recommendations

As I say, it is a disheartening picture, but recognising it is an important step towards rectifying it. The report makes eight recommendations based around a ‘Rail’ framework: rethink; attain; include; lived experience.

• Rethink what mid-career means. Reframe it as a time of expansion and not reduction, with increased opportunities developed around a set of ‘personas’ that would allow for a more nuanced model.
• Attain the necessary skills to develop through clearer training, including that for ‘procedural’ skills and knowledge, such as how to be a line manager or head of department.
• Include mid-career researchers more fully by removing contractual idiosyncrasies where rigid contracts become unnecessary ‘gatekeepers’ or blockers to mid-career staff accessing or applying for career opportunities and promotions. There should also be opportunities specific to mid-career researchers, to tackle attrition and career stagnation rates for staff who are underrepresented and systematically marginalised.
• Lived experience should be fully recognised and incorporated in HR systems, so that formal and informal mentorship and sponsorship programmes, networks and collaboratives can thrive. Alternative and meaningful definitions of success should be encouraged and embraced, including proper recognition and rewarding of ‘softer’ skills such as mentoring, coaching and sponsorship.

I believe this is a hugely significant report. It brings into focus a familiar but hazy problem. It provides clear evidence of the current situation and, more importantly, offers a blueprint for addressing it. We must act on it if we are to retain and realise the potential of those who will be our future research leaders. If we don’t, we risk losing them and the world-changing research they could produce. With the world in a state of omni-crisis, it’s a risk we can ill afford.

Phil Ward is director of the Eastern Arc consortium, a collaboration between the Universities of East Anglia, Essex and Kent.

The post Mid-career researchers: a blueprint for change appeared first on Research Professional News.

Friendship is a valuable antidote to an increasingly competitive academia

Some things don’t change. “The world of academia is competitive and sometimes brutal” began the strapline when this article was first published in December 2018. In the article, Tseen Khoo’s prescription against that ongoing state of affairs was to find—and keep—a few critical friends, and she goes on to explain how to do that.

It may be difficult for researchers to find colleagues or friends who are willing to provide critical feedback for grant applications or academic work. Feedback may most often come from gatekeepers, assessors or senior researchers—possibly your direct manager. These are often authority figures that you seek approval from, rather than people you can comfortably approach time and time again as you work your way up the academic ladder.

Academia requires people to jump through hoop after hoop, so having good processes for receiving feedback and constructively moving onto the next stage can make life a lot easier whether you are an early-career academic or have been publishing papers and applying for grants for many years. 

The value of a critical friend

To make academic life easier and more productive, I would recommend finding—and keeping—good critical friends. These are colleagues whom you trust to read your work—for example a grant application, journal paper, promotion document or research report—and give you rigorous, constructive feedback. They are supportive and invested in helping you develop your track record. 

The concept of critical friends is well established in education circles and most researchers have them even if they may not call them that; some universities even ‘outsource’ them for academics.

I hold workshops about publishing in journals every semester, and one thing I find myself repeating is the importance of cultivating a strong group of critical friends. Workshop participants tend to nod in understanding, look concerned about the work involved in doing so—as they lack critical friends—or are lost about how to get started. Here is some advice to help you kick-start your search for critical friends.

How do I find critical friends?

Critical friends are colleagues who you consider friends or friendly acquaintances, not strangers. If you struggle to find potential critical friends, you should think further about growing your collegial networks. You can do this by getting involved in professional associations and conferences, or pushing further to meet diverse people, for example.

How can I tell if someone might be a good critical friend?

• I like and trust them, and I trust their intellectual perspectives.
• They are honest and kind. They would not tell me something was great if it was not. However, they would not slay me with critique but offer constructive suggestions to improve my work. In other words, they would consider my feelings.
• I am willing to establish a reciprocal academic relationship with them. Having someone become my critical friend automatically means I would become theirs.

Here are three ways to ensure you keep on friendly terms with your critical friends:

Give them enough time to provide feedback

Do not flick something to a critical friend if you need it back in a day or a few hours. Rushed feedback is often not the best feedback, and you would risk burning that bridge. Having said that, some of your closer critical friends understand if things go awry once in a while and can give you a fast turnaround. This is especially the case if you’ve done it for them in the past.

Reciprocity matters 

Critical friends are there for each other in academic endeavours; they do not just tap each other for a favour but otherwise have no connection with each other. They help each other out, but having said that, a healthy critical friend relationship is not transactional and keeping score is not a part of being a good critical friend.

Share the load

Do not overuse your critical friends. If you have a limited number of them you should consider when it is more crucial for you to call on them and when it would be nice but not essential. This does not include referees, who should know what they are in for when agreeing to take up that role.

A wider network of critical friends allows you to spread the work around a bit. For example, if you are looking for a job you are probably applying to a whole bunch of roles. You may want to divide the workload by asking different critical friends to look over your documents for different types of positions.

Different critical friends can be better for different contexts. I would lean on my more seasoned grant-applying friends for their take on my funding application and choose more discipline-focused others if I had a draft of a paper or book chapter.

Building a strong critical friend network takes time and it is an ongoing process. Having such a network is one of the joys of being a scholar and a valuable investment of your time.

Tseen Khoo is a senior lecturer in the research education and development team, at the graduate research school, La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia. With Jonathan O’Donnell, Tseen created and runs the research development and research culture blog The Research Whisperer

The post From the archive: Critical friends and their benefits appeared first on Research Professional News.