Tag Archives: Strategy

Recipe for a NIH Grant

ManhattanI’ve just spent a very pleasant few days in New York City teaching post-docs at  Mount Sinai my recipe for a NIH grant. We focused on the K99/R00 scheme, which is for applicants less than 4 years from their PhD. K99/R00 applications must  include career-development as well as  research, which makes them more complex than a pure research grant, but the recipe I developed can easily accommodate other grant schemes by adjusting  the formula for their assessment criteria. Before I describe the recipe – how you get the grant written – I need to say something about the formula – what the finished grant consists of.

The Formula

The formula is based on the principle that you should make it as easy as possible for those who carry out the peer review of your grant to do their job. NIH makes it very easy to apply this principle because they take great trouble both to explain their peer review process and to list the review criteria for every kind of grant they offer.

The peer review process is carried out by a study section, a group of about 15 scientists whose expertise covers the area of the grant. Three of them, the reviewers, have to produce a written assessment of the grant and score it against the review criteria before the study section meets. At the study section the reviewers present the grant orally, then it is discussed openly and then scored by secret ballot. All members of the study section join in the discussion and vote on the score even though they may not have read the grant, although they will probably have read the 1 page Specific Aims, or the 30 line Summary. So the formula has two requirements.

  • It must be very easy for the reviewers to understand the grant quickly and to find the detail that shows whether or not it meets the assessment criteria.
  • It must be easy for the other members of the study section to speed read it and understand it.

To make it easy for reviewers, the three versions of the grant – the 12-page Research Strategy, the 1 page Specific Aims and the 30 line Summary should be recognisably the same, so that someone who has read the Summary or the Specific Aims should find the Research Strategy looks familiar. I recommend that you define the grant with a set of about 10 key statements that address the review criteria. The key statements begin major sections of the Research Strategy and are followed by text that justifies them and convinces the reviewer that they are true. The reviewer will be familiar with the key statements because they appear in the same order in the Specific Aims and the Summary, but with less text to justify them.

The repetition of the key statements between the Summary, the Specific Aims and the Research Strategy helps the other members of the study section to feel that they understand the Research Strategy as soon as they glance at it. To make it possible for them to speed-read it, the top line of every paragraph should contain the main message of the paragraph and there should be white space between the paragraphs.

The Recipe

To cook up a grant with this formula you need to start by deciding what key statements you need. NIH assessment criteria are very helpful here.

  • All grants are required to have a number of specific aims – goals that the research hopes to achieve. Three is the ideal number of specific aims – just as it is the ideal number of points to make in an emphatic statement.
  • The Research Strategy document must be divided into three sections, each of which is assessed. They are Significance, how important the research is; Innovation, what is new about the research, and Approach, how you are going to do the research.

Each specific aim needs one key statement to state its significance and one to state the approach to achieving it. Innovation can be stated separately for each aim or in a single staement that covers all three aime. Thus you need between 7 and 9 key statements to cover the basic criteria.

In addition you should have a couple of key statements to introduce the Research Strategy. These make the ‘elevator pitch’. The first needs to say what overall outcome is hoped for, something about how it will be achieved and something about your credentials for carrying out the project. The second needs to say something about the project’s overall importance. You can think of these statements as the opening remarks of the reviewer addressing the study section. They correspond to key sentences 1 and 2.

Finally you probably need an ‘onwards and upwards’ statement to finish off the Research Strategy, something that says how you will take the research forwards at the end of the project.

The K99/R00 grant has a training requirement. The research project must contain a mentored (K99) component and an independent (R00) component. The candidate is also required to submit a training and career development plan. The criteria make it clear that the K99 project must develop the candidate’s skills to prepare them for the independent phase. One or two extra key statements are needed to address this aspect of the project.

Once you have drawn up your list of key statements you draft them. They are the introductory sentences of the main subections of the Research Strategy. Don’t spend too much time perfecting these sentences. Get on with writing the sections that they introduce. As you draft those sections you will naturally polish the key statements until they are as good as you can make them.

Once you have a complete draft of the Research Strategy you can copy the key statements from it into the one-page Specific Aims document. Make that document up to a page by cutting and pasting more text from the Research Strategy or by drafting new text. You should cut and paste wherever possible to maximise the overlap between the two documents.

There are a number of sources that help you with content.

These can help you to modify the formula by choosing different sets of key statements and by varying which key statements appear in the different components of the application. But the best way to minimise the pain of writing is to follow the recipe.

Say it again Sam. And use the same words.

groundhogRepetition of key sentences and key phrases is extremely important in a grant application. The key sentences that introduce each subsection of the background and the description of the project in the case for support should be repeated in the introduction and also in the summary.  So each key sentence should appear at least three times.

Some key phrases should be repeated more than three times because they occur in more than one key sentence. For example, imagine you are writing a grant in which one of the sub-projects will characterise the relationship between motherhood and apple pie.  The phrase ‘the relationship between motherhood and apple pie’ will be in two of your key sentences.  One will explain why we need to characterise ‘the relationship between motherhood and apple pie’.  The other will introduce  the description of the sub-project that characterises the relationship between motherhood and apple pie.

Most academics accept that it is helpful to repeat key sentences. But most of them reject the idea that the repetition should use  the same words in the same order.  So I want to explain now why it is more effective to use the same words in the same order whenever you repeat a phrase or sentence.

Effectiveness is much more important here than correctness.  Few would disagree with the assertion that exact repetition is a more correct use of English than paraphrasing but it is much more important to think about how you can increase the effectiveness of a grant application by using repetition in the way that I recommend and how you will fail to increase effectiveness in the same way if you change the words you use or their order.

In thinking about the effectiveness of a grant application, we should consider who will read it and how.  Committee members and referees have different needs and derive different benefits  from repetition.

The most important readers are the committee members that make the decision.  All of them will have a vote in deciding whether or not the grant application gets funded. Few, if any,  will understand the details of the research topic. All of them will read the summary and most of them will stop there. Some will try to read the application and understand it. Usually two  members of the committee, the designated members, are tasked with reading the application and leading the committee discussion. They will try hard to understand the application, but they will find it very difficult and they won’t have much time – maybe an hour. Any help you give them will be gratefully received.  Although most of the rest of the committee will not read the application they will probably glance through it during the discussion.

There are three ways that repetition is particularly helpful to committee members:-

  • Repeating the key sentences means that all the committee members will be likely to remember them. Even those who just glance through the application once will read the key sentences three times. This means that there is a very good chance that they will remember them and understand the logic of your case for support – what outcome your project will achieve, why it is important, what things you need to know in order to achieve the outcome and how you will achieve them. If you repeat the key sentences but substantially change the wording then people will be less likely to remember them. Every change in wording is likely to be interpreted as a change in meaning, leading to potential confusion.
  • Repeating key phrases in the sentences that state what we need to know and what the sub-projects will discover makes it very clear that the project will discover exactly what we need to know. In this way the key phrases act like labels for the different parts of the project.
  • Repeating the key phrases enables committee members to learn them and to have a sense of what they mean. Humans learn the meaning of new phrases by encountering them repeated in different contexts. Committee members who read your grant application carefully will get the sense that they know what it means , even if they don’t. If you vary the wording of the key phrases it becomes harder to learn them and  less clear to the reader that you mean the same thing.

The referees are, notionally at least,  experts in the research topic. They will read the application, write an analysis of its strengths and weaknesses and give it a score, which the committee will consider, but not necessarily follow.  The referees are likely to read your application more carefully than the committee members and to have a deeper understanding of the topic. However, they will want to assess whether the detailed content of your case for support actually supports the assertions made in the key sentences. Repetition helps them do this in two stages.

  • Reading the key sentences in the summary and in the introduction allows them to create a mental list of questions to which they want to find answers in the case for support.
  • Repeating the key sentences at the head of each subsection of the case for support guides the referees to the answers. Again, the key phrases act like labels. For example, a referee that has some doubts about whether your research approach really will characterise the relationship between motherhood and apple pie will be guided straight to the place where you describe the relevant part of your research approach by the phrase the relationship between motherhood and apple pie. If you decide to change any of the words in the key phrase, not only does it become less effective as a label, it also introduces the possibility that you are seeking to do a piece of research without having told the reader why it is important to do it.

In sum, repetition of key sentences and key phrases makes a grant application more effective in four different ways, provided that you use the same words in the same order.

 

 

We had the workshop: where are the grants?

16630702_sAt Parker Derrington Ltd we often encounter rather fixed ideas about how to improve grant-writing outcomes. ” A workshop is what we need….. Can you manage 100 participants? Can you tell them how to get bigger grants? Can you do it any cheaper? What can you do in half a day?”  Obviously, to survive in business we have to allow the customer to be right, so we find ourselves giving rather a lot of grant-writing workshops.

Of course we think our workshops are the best in the business and we get excellent feedback.  However, a workshop can only do so much. Even academics who have good ideas, a good track record of publications and who can design a fundable research project need more than a workshop can provide. Let me explain. There are three problems that tend to prevent such academics from writing good research-grant applications:-

  • They don’t appreciate the unwritten constraints on the case for support.
  • They don’t have an efficient way of writing a grant-application.
  • They don’t usually get high quality help and encouragement from other academics.

The first two are covered in the workshops, but the third is not. Let’s look at the details.

The unwritten constraints on the case for support

There are two constraints that push people in opposite directions.

  • The Case for Support must be speed-readable. Research councils don’t tell you that most of the committee members who take the decision on your research-grant application probably  haven’t read the case for support properly. Worse,  even if committee members did read the case for support properly, most of them wouldn’t understand it.  Obviously your case for support must enable speed-readers to understand and remember what you expect to discover, why it is important, how you will do it, and what you will do with the results.
  • It must be easy to find the detail in the Case for Support. It will also be read by expert referees who will want to assess the detail of what you will do and why it is worth doing. However, few people appreciate that referees will do a much better job and will feel happier about doing it if you make the job easy. So your case for support should  guide referees to the specific content that supports each element of the case. And your summary should make it absolutely clear what arguments the case is making, so that referees know before they begin reading the case for support, what arguments they want to test.

In our workshops we explain how these constraints arise and how to design a case for support that meets them.

An efficient grant-writing process

It should be possible to write a research-grant-application in a week. Most people take months. Some take years.

We find two common factors that make writing inefficient. Probably the commonest is starting to write the grant proposal before designing the research project. Remember, the grant application is a marketing document that is trying to secure investment in the project. It can take a very long time to write it if  you start before you define the project because you don’t know what you are marketing.  Moreover, applications that are not based on a defined project usually fail to convince the reader that they are marketing anything at all: we call them zombie grants. A second factor that makes writing inefficient is not having a guide that tells you what to write in each part of the case for support.

We teach a 2-stage approach to writing in which the first stage is to write a summary that consists of 10 key sentences. That summary is enough to check whether the writer has a viable project. In the second stage, the summary is a guide that tells you what to write in each part of the case for support. Each of the key sentences  forms the first sentence of a major sub-section of the case for support and defines what the rest of the sub-section must convince the reader to be true, either with evidence or with detail about proposed research activities.

How to help a grant-writer.

It’s harder to help a grant-writer than you might think. It should be easy to give clear feedback that will tell them exactly what they have done wrong. Actually, it’s quite hard to do that unless your heart is made of stone, because accurate feedback is crushingly demotivating. Telling a colleague what is wrong with a grant-application that has taken them six months to write can completely destroy their motivation.

To write a grant quickly and well, a writer needs encouragement and feedback, delivered as directly and as quickly as possible.  Our 2-stage approach to writing makes it easier to give constructive feedback, partly because it breaks the writing task down into smaller chunks but also because it makes it easier to define what is expected at each stage, so it combines feedforward with feedback. We offer workshops for coaches to help academics coach their colleagues it but we also offer coaching directly to writers, either as a stand-alone service or as a follow-up to a workshop.  If you are interested, get in touch.

First you tell them; then you convince them.

Quotative Like; xkcd.com

Some  common writing styles are very bad for grant applications and this post aims to help you to avoid one of the worst.  It is a style of writing that we refer to in the Research Funding Toolkit as “Argue – conclude”.

Argue-conclude writing sets out the argument for a statement before it makes the statement.  Done well, argue-conclude writing can be very convincing for a dedicated reader,  who will follow every twist and turn of  your argument. By the time they get to read a statement that ordinarily they might be inclined to reject, they already know the arguments that support it. Unfortunately, most of the readers who will decide whether your grant application gets funded are less dedicated. They will give up reading before they get to the crucial statement.

To communicate with these readers, you begin each paragraph with its main message. Then use the rest of the paragraph to convince them that the message is true. In the Research Funding Toolkit we refer to this style as “assert-justify“. An easy way to describe about assert-justify style is “Tell them; then convince them”.

As I was writing this I thought of nine reasons you should adopt “Assert-justify” style in research grant applications.  The first four are concerned with meeting the needs of the reader – one of the guiding principles for writing with style. The remaining five are concerned with making the task of writing easier. Naturally I shall assert each reason and then justify it.

  1. Assert-justify style communicates more effectively with speed-readers, tired readers, and lazy readers.
    These readers will skim through your document. The neurology of eye-movements dictates that, provided you put blank lines between the paragraphs, their eyes will skip from paragraph to paragraph. They will read the first line of each paragraph. Thus they will read the assertions and get the headline messages. If they are inclined to disagree with the headline messages, they will dig down into the arguments that justify them.
  2. Assert-justify style makes it easier for diligent readers, such as referees, to examine your arguments in detail.
    Each paragraph starts by stating what the paragraph is about. This makes it very easy for the reader to find the arguments they want to examine. They never face the problem of wading through an argument wondering where it is leading.
  3. Assert-justify style makes it easier for the committee-member who has to present your grant to the rest of the committee.
    They can see at a glance what points you are trying to make. This makes it very easy for them to select the points that are most important and relevant for the committee, even if they don’t entirely understand them.
  4. Assert-justify style is more likely to engage readers who are bored.
    The conclusion is always the most interesting part of the argument. By putting the conclusion first you are more likely to entice them to read.
  5. Assert-justify style makes it easier to write an accurate summary.
    The assertions from each paragraph comprise a draft summary. If you want a shorter summary you may be able to leave some of them out.
  6. Assert-justify style makes it easier to write a good introduction.
    The assertions from each paragraph comprise the core of the introduction. You may need to add some linking text and some signposts.
  7. Assert-justify style makes it easier to write short sentences.
    You can write in simple, clear statements. You don’t need to frame them and qualify them.
  8. Assert-justify style makes it easier to write short paragraphs.
    In argue-conclude writing you have to spend a lot of words preparing the ground for the argument. If you start by asserting the point you want to make, you leap straight into the argument without spending any words.
  9. Assert-justify style makes it easier to write.
    I used to spend a lot of time staring at my screen wondering how to get started on each section. In assert-justify writing you can write the ten key sentences that start each sub-section of a grant proposal in an hour.

There are probably more and better reasons to write in assert-justify style.  When I started writing this post, I only had three!  If you have any doubts about whether assert-justify style is correct, it may help you to know that some time after writing this post I discovered a tenth reason: courses on English for academic purposes advise that every paragraph should contain a sentence that states the message of the paragraph, the topic sentence, and that it should usually be the first sentence.

Let me finish with an example of what I think you should avoid. This abstract of a funded grant application is short and clearly written but it is in argue-conclude style; consequently the piece of information that the reader most wants to know – what will the research project do – is buried away in the second half of a sentence in the last paragraph. A speed-reader would not see it.

Committees and Referees

Committees Like a Simple Story: thanks to Science and Ink http://www.lab-initio.com

Committees prefer a clear story: http://labinitio.com

The Journal Nature reported yesterday that scientists have complained that there is a mismatch between expert referees’ evaluation scores of research grant applications and funding decisions.  Different interviewees claimed that this mismatch either does or does not indicate either a flaw in the system or mistakes by referees or by committees.

There may be flaws in the system and mistakes probably happen, but there is a more obvious reason that referees’ scores should not be expected to predict funding decisions. Referees and committees do different jobs which impose different constraints on the way a grant application is written. Very few proposals are written in a way that satisfies both sets of constraints, and so, for the majority of proposals, there is no reason to expect a close match between the referees’ score and the committee’s score. Before I explain the constraints and how to meet them, I’ll clarify the story and explain its relevance.

The story was based on 302 grant applications to the Medical Research Council. It states that some applications that received high scores from the referees were triaged (rejected without being discussed by the committee). Of the proposals discussed by the committee, the story states that the group of applications that were successful and the group that were rejected had ‘a nearly identical spread of scores’. It’s worth noting that the story focuses on a statistic of the scores that is not particularly informative (spread) and does not mention any other statistics. It is relatively common that the referees include both friends and foes of the applicant, which can cause the spread of scores on a single application to range from the lowest to the highest possible. Consequently, nothing that the story says about this rather small data sample indicates a general failure of referees’ scores to predict committee decisions.

However, whatever we may try to conclude from this small dataset, most funding agencies (the EPSRC is an exception in the UK) ask referees and committees to do very different jobs. These jobs depend on different aspects of the way the proposal is written.

Referees work alone and each one works on a single application. The referees are expected to be experts in the same research field as the applicant and their evaluations are typically seen as coming from within that field. Their main task is to test the detailed rationale of the proposal. Are the research questions important? Is the research approach feasible? Does the research team have the ability to carry out the project? What is their standing in the field? Has their previous work made a significant contribution? Is the approach novel? Are other teams likely to get the answers first?

To get a good score from a referee, a grant application must contain relevant detail. Evidence that the questions are important and relevant must be cited. Any evidence to the contrary must be dealt with effectively. The research approach must be described clearly and in sufficient detail to convince a knowledgeable sceptic that the project is feasible, can be carried out with the resources requested, and will lead to the promised outcomes.

The committee works as a collective and takes a view across all the applications before them, typically about 100 for a single meeting. They must also take a view across all the different research fields that the committee supports. They need it to be clear that the project will deliver an  outcome that will have importance beyond the immediate research area and that the applicant has identified an approach that is likely to be productive and that the research team has the skills to deliver it. They need to know what the research aims are and how they relate to the overall outcome. They need it to be clear that the research objectives will satisfy the research aims and deliver the overall outcome and that the results will have appropriate impact

More importantly, the committee also works very quickly. They have to reach an agreed view about grant applications which most or all of them may not understand completely. For the committee to score an application highly they need it to be possible to understand it on the basis of a single hasty reading – or even a quick skim. The case for support should have a very clear structure that states clearly what will be the research outcome, why it is important, what are the research aims, what are the objectives and what will be done with the results.

Of course the best possible case for support has a clear structure that enables the committee to understand it and appreciate its strong points. It also uses the structure to guide the referees to the relevant detail. In my experience cases of support written in this way get very high scores both from referees and from committees. Unfortunately they are very rare but this blog explains in several different ways how to write them.

 

Build the Project, Then Fit the Question

Was your question clearly linked to your project?

Is your question important to the funder?

The first thing you must do in a grant application is convince the reader that you are going to address a question that is important to the funder. Your grant will definitely not get funded unless you convince the reader that your research question is important to the funder. Even so,  you should take a project first approach. Generate your project and then fit the question to it. Do not try to pick an important question and then design a project to solve it. The project first approach is quicker – often by several months – and it reduces the risk of writing a zombie grant.

The project first approach is easier if you take a modular approach to project design and start by generating a catalogue of sub-projects.  As you generate each sub-project, you should ask  yourself if the outcome will contribute to answering an important question. If it will, keep the sub-project and begin preparing yourself to make that case. Otherwise, discard that sub-project and try  to generate another one with an outcome that will contribute to answering an important question.

Once you have a few sub-projects – ideally at least five or six – it is easy to generate projects. The ideal project has three, or just possibly four, sub-projects.  When you combine sub-projects to generate a project you need to start looking hard for a good research question. You need a question that covers all  of the sub-project outcomes comfortably. It is better to take a question that is too big to answer, and answer it partially, rather than risk picking a question that is too small to be exciting and answer it completely.

An important part of your development as a researcher is to develop the ability to design projects that produce results that help to answer important questions. I absorbed this from the culture of the lab in which I did my PhD and this is part of the approach we recommend in the book. However, it is also possible to search on the web to see if a given funder will fund the kinds of research outcomes you are likely to produce.  Obviously every funder’s website will have a statement of their remit, but this can be hard to interpret because it will be couched in terms of questions rather than outcomes. A better way to get a sense of the outcomes that excite a given funder is to scan their press releases. Best of all, some funders have a database that includes the abstracts of all their funded projects.

The Gateway to Funded Research is a searchable database that covers  all the UK research councils. The Projects and Results page on the European Research Council website is also searchable and allows you to see research outcomes.

A simple answer to a simple question

lab-initio.com astrophysicsmadesimple

Try to write a simple answer in one sentence

Last week I was a rather noisy fly on the wall in a workshop run by Sara Shinton to help  post-docs prepare for fellowship interviews. Sara pointed out that many institutions, including Glasgow University, which is where the workshop took place, have developed extensive support programmes for would-be fellows and will arrange a mock interview if you give them sufficient notice.

We also worked out a simple 10 minute exercise you can do to set yourself up to perform well in the interview. The key, if, like me, you have a tendency to be nervous, is to prepare and to learn a really good answer to a question that almost always crops up at the start of the interview. The question is very simple: Could you tell the committee a little bit about your project. Preparing a good answer to this question is a bit more difficult, but the exercise helps a great deal.

It is best to work with a colleague, someone who is preparing for an interview or writing a project grant themselves is ideal. It’s best if you don’t know too much about their research. The exercise is very simple. Spend exactly 4 minutes asking your friend about their project – you need to find out

  • What will the project try to achieve?
  • Why would that achievement be important?
  • How will the project try to achieve it?
  • Why is your colleague a good person to lead the project?

At the end of 4 minutes switch roles so that your colleague questions you about your project. Then you both write one sentence about each project. Spend 1 minute on the sentence and try to  give a simple overall statement of what the project will achieve, ideally you will relate that achievement to a big important problem and will also include something distinctive about how the project will achieve it in a way that will make it clear that the PI is a suitable person to do the project.

The sentence you need is something like key sentence 1.  You probably want the language to be a bit less formal than you would write in an application because you want to speak it. An ideal sentence would have a structure like this one:- “I’m going to identify potential treatments for stroke by testing compounds that we have found to inhibit brain metabolism in tissue culture”. It does 3 things.

  1. It says that you are working towards something pretty important, a treatment for stroke. It makes it clear that you don’t expect to get there by saying ‘potential‘. Everyone knows that the road from ‘potential treatment’ to ‘treatment’ can be a long one.
  2. It uses the phrase ‘we have found’ which says that you are working with compounds that you have worked with before. This establishes that you have credentials to do the work.
  3. It says that you are going to be testing metabolic inhibitors in tissue culture, which gives a sense of the kind of research you will be doing and the kind of drug that might be developed as a result.

The ideal sentence will have about 30 words. The example I have given has 23. We discovered that some of the workshop participants can write very long and very complex sentences in a minute. We also found that it’s often easier to write a good and convincing sentence about someone else’s project than about your own. Often you can make a really strong sentence by combining phrases from your sentence with phrases from a sentence produced by someone who knows much less than you do about the technicalities.

Dealing with rejection 2: Salvage.

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Salvage is the only way forward after rejection.

The most difficult aspect of grant rejection, apart from not having a grant of course, is that your motivation to write new applications evaporates. That’s why it’s even more important than working out what was wrong with your rejected application to salvage what you can from the rejected application and start putting together a new one.

It is of course important to take the opportunity to learn what you can about what was wrong with the rejected application and I wrote about how to do that last week. However, whether or not you learn anything from it, you must come to terms with the fact that your rejected application is dead. Yes, dead. I’m sorry, I did say dead and I do mean dead. Mourn its passing but do not imagine that editing will reanimate its corpse. Use your editing pencil instead to mark useful parts to salvage and recycle.

 Salvage the Sub-Projects One at a Time

The most important part of the case for support is the description of the project. This should be at least half the case for support and it should be subdivided into three or four sub-projects. If it isn’t subdivided into projects then you can divide it up as you salvage it.

A sub-project is a discrete set of research activities designed to produce a definable outcome. You must divide your project into sub-projects in order to make it accessible for the grants committee. Remember, they are not experts in your field so they are unlikely to appreciate your project unless you can break it into bite-sized chunks.

If you cannot easily divide your research into sub-projects you can use the timeline of your project to divide it into phases. You will need to be able to say in a single sentence what you expect to be the outcome of each phase. If it’s impossible to do this you need to think again. You won’t get funding for a research project unless you can produce a succinct statement about what you expect to have happened by the time you are about a third of the way through it.   Of course you can use natural break-points in your project to divide it into phases that are not exactly equal, but if you want to get funded you must be able to give confidence that you will are able to plan the progress of your research.

Record Key Information About Each Sub-Project

To make it easy to re-use the sub-projects you need to record extra information with them. I suggested in a previous post that you should compile a catalogue of sub-projects with this information.

  • The most important thing to record is what the outcome would be if you were to carry out the sub-project. You should use this to draft a key sentence that describes the sub-project and states the outcome, unless you have already written such a sentence.
  • A list of the research activities that comprise the sub-project.
  • A list of the skills needed to carry out the sub-project.
  • A list of the resources needed to carry out the activities in the sub-project. This consists of 2 sub-lists:-
    • resources already available to you, and
    • resources you need the grant to pay for.

If you can salvage all of your sub-projects you should have about half what you need for another grant application. However I strongly recommend that you try to create a portfolio of sub-projects so that you can re-use them in different combinations.

 Useful Sentences and Phrases

The descriptions of the sub-projects are the only large chunks of text that I would advise you to salvage from the proposal. The other sub-sections will probably not be relevant if you restructure your project, which I strongly advise you to do. However, there are some snippets of text that could be worth salvaging from the rejected proposal.

  • Key sentences, other than those in the sections of text you have salvaged, are probably not worth salvaging. The ones that express the need to do the sub-projects you have salvaged will be useful but they are very easy to write. Any others should be viewed with suspicion because they have failed.
  • Sentences that refer to your research and project management skills and those of your team are quite difficult to write and should be salvaged if they read well. If your project is for BBSRC, NERC, MRC or EPSRC there will be whole sections of text describing the accomplishments of the different members of the project team that should be salvageable.
  • Descriptions of how existing resources will be used should also be salvaged, even when they are part of  sub-projects that you may not re-use.

Finally, a word of caution, be suspicious of all the text you are salvaging. Something in your grant application sank it and, unless your feedback made it very clear what it was, you should be cautious about the possibility of salvaging something that could sink the next one.

Are you ready to start?

Starting Line Photo

Starting Line

In this post I will tell you how to decide whether you should start writing a grant application. In essence it’s about how to check whether you have a viable, fundable research project before you go to the trouble of writing the grant application.

This is the third in a series of posts prompted by a desire to show people the easiest possible way to write a research grant application really quickly. I also want to help people avoid wasting time by trying to write grant applications that are unlikely to be finished and virtually certain to be rejected.

In the first post in the series, I argued that you should not start writing until you are ready to write the description of your research project. For me this is a no-brainer. It’s not just that I have seen many people waste years writing flabby, no-hoper grant applications that carefully define a big question and fail to say how they will answer it. It’s more fundamental. The whole point of a grant application is that it is an attempt to sell a research project to a funding body. How can you start trying to sell something before you can say what it is?

In the second post in the series, I advised that a good way to make sure that you are always ready to write a research project at short notice, is to use a process that I call ‘outlining’ to maintain an outline, a catalogue of possible sub-projects. A sub-project is a discrete piece of research; three or four sub-projects make a nice, saleable research project.

I explained that the outline consists of five lists for each sub-project:-

  • a list of discoveries or outcomes, what each sub-project will achieve;
  • a list of the activities that will be carried out in order to make the discovery;
  • a list of the skills that will be needed to carry out the activities;
  • a list of the resources that will be needed to carry out the activities.
      • The resource list will be split into two sub-lists. The first will list the resources that will be paid for by the grant and the second will list those that will be, or have already been, paid for by the institution. It is often necessary to move items between these two sub-lists because funders have different rules about what resources they will pay for.

Whether or not you maintain a catalogue of sub-projects, you should prepare an outline of your proposed research project before you begin to write bout it. That is, you should compile the 5 lists of information for the three or four sub-projects in your proposed research project.

The advantage of using an outline is that it makes the task of writing and submitting a grant much more efficient. The outline contains the information you need for the three main tasks involved in writing and submitting a grant application.

  • It contains the information you need to check the viability of your proposed project, which is the subject of this post.
  • It contains the information you need to negotiate, and to calculate in detail,  the resourcing of the project.
  • It contains essential information that must be used in writing the project.

How to test your project before you start.

To check the viability of your project you should ask the questions below. All of these questions will be asked, either by the funder or by your institution, after your grant application is written. It will save time to ask them now and make sure that the answers are appropriate before you start writing. I have set out the questions in sections according to the list that has the information needed to answer them. The sections are in the order resources, activities, skills and discoveries.

Resources

  • Are all the resources being requested allowable under the chosen funding scheme?
    • If not, you have three choices. Find a different funder; find a different source of funds to pay for the ineligible resources; or change the sub-project for one that doesn’t need them.
    • Don’t make the mistake of assuming that an especially persuasive application will persuade the funder to bend the rules.
  • Will the resources to be provided by the institution definitely be available to the project?
    • Now is the time to check with your line manager or Head of Department.
    • Don’t forget to include your time if you have a salaried position.
    • Don’t forget the research and office space and equipment that will be needed for the research and the researchers.
  • Is the grant requested the right size?
    • This is not just a matter of whether it is within the stated limits of the funding scheme for which you are applying. It should be within the typical range both for the scheme and for an applicant of your standing. Your institution’s research office, or the funding body will usually be happy to give you good advice on this.
    • If your grant is the wrong size, do not make the mistake of trying to fix it by changing the resource list: change the whole project by scaling up or scaling down sub-projects until you have a project that is the right size.
  • Is the complete set of resources adequate to carry out all the activities of the project?
    • It is very common for grants to be rejected outright because of a mismatch.
    • Asking for too little is definitely worse than asking for too much but neither is good.

 Activities

  • Will the specified activities lead to the specified outcomes?
    • This is the heart and soul of the research proposal. You sell the project on the basis of the outcomes it will produce (see below). You will have to write a description of the project that will convince the reader that what you plan to do will do will produce the outcomes you claim. You will only be able to convince them if your description is comprehensive.
  • Can all the activities be done within the specified times?
    • It is a common and fatal mistake to promise far too much and to be vague about how it will get done. It is important to be realistic about what can be done by ordinary mortals in modest time-frames.
    •  And remember it is important to adjust the project rather than to make unrealistic promises about how long it will take.

Skills

  • Does the project team have all the skills?
    • The test that a grants’ committee will apply is whether the research team has peer-reviewed publications that demonstrate the use of the skills. If not, then you need to enhance your team or reduce your project. If you can’t do that, write papers, not a grant.
  • Are the skills sufficient to carry out the activities?
  • Do the skills justify the staff to be paid for by the grant?
    • If you want to hire a post-doc to do a project, it will need to be clear that advanced research skills are part of the project. 

Discoveries or Outcomes

  • Do we need to know that?
    • Are the research outcomes important enough to deserve funding? Funding agencies all have their own statements about their criteria for evaluating research outcomes. Typically they are  interested in discoveries that advance understanding in an important subject or field of study, or that will improve health or economic or social well-being. Although you don’t need chapter and verse at this stage you do need to be reasonably certain that your research will lead to new knowledge or understanding that will have an impact on your field or on society, or on both.
    • It is important that none of your sub-projects could possibly produce results that would render the other sub-projects pointless. For example a project that starts by isolating the bacterium responsible for a disease and then doing lots of experiments to understand the physiology of the bacterium and how the disease can be cured or prevented will fail at the first step if the bacterium cannot be isolated. Many projects fail to get funded because they appear to have this kind of dependency between the early and late phases.
    • Do not claim that your research will show everybody else is wrong, even if you think it will. It is better to put a positive spin on the current state of knowledge and explain how your work will advance it.

So what?

Of course all these questions can, and should, be asked by somebody reading your grant application after it is written. However, by asking the right questions before you start writing you make it easier to write a good grant application quickly. You also make it possible to begin the detailed work necessary to make sure that your research project is properly resourced and costed as soon as you start writing it, rather than after you have finished. Many grant applications have been compromised by the need to make hasty last-minute adjustments because of difficulties about resourcing that only became apparent after the writing was done.

Next week I will explain how, using the information in the outline of your research project, you should be able to sketch out your case for support in a couple of hours.

Be Prepared

3383951_sIn this post I want to tell you how you can be prepared to write a grant application quickly and with minimum effort. Last week I warned you about the trap of the never-ending grant application. This week I am telling you how you can make sure you never fall into it.

The essence of the approach is that you use a process that I call ‘outlining’ to compile a personal catalogue of possible research sub-projects. Each sub-project consists of a piece of research that you would like to do, but for which you don’t currently have the time or the resources. If you can create a suitable catalogue you will be able to design a viable research project very quickly. If you cannot create such a catalogue, you are not ready to write a grant application and you should not waste the time.

This approach is the easiest way to discover whether you are able to start writing the description of a research project. I will discuss how you create the basic building block of your research project, a sub-project, and how you create a catalogue of sub-projects.

The definition of a sub-project is very flexible and is very much up to you. We point out in the book, The Research Funding Toolkit, that a research project is much easier to write about if it can be broken down into about four components. These components are the sub-projects. So for the 2-3 year research project of a typical grant-application a sub-project will be about 6 plus or minus 2 months full-time research.

Sub-projects should be conceptually discrete but they might overlap in time and in resources. For example, imagine a psychology research project to test whether particular numerical and verbal skills develop at different rates in boys and girls. It might consist of a series of discrete sub-projects each of which measures a different set of numerical and verbal skills. Each sub-project can be defined in terms of what research will be done, what resources will be needed and what the sub-project will discover. However, the sub-projects might well be carried out during the same time period using the same equipment.

The point of the sub-project is that, when you are explaining a big research project, it is very helpful to break it down into a small number of discrete components, which together build up into a significant package. And when you are trying to design a significant research project, it is usually easier to build it up out of a number of sub-projects.

In compiling the kind of catalogue you need for writing research grants it is essential to record 5 sets of information about each sub-project. These are:-

  • What the sub-project will discover or establish. Ideally a sub-project will discover something that can be expressed in a single sentence. For example, one of the sub-projects in our hypothetical psychology project might establish whether ability to solve arithmetic problems is equally related with ability to write complex sentences in boys and girls.
  • What activities the sub-project consists of. For example, our hypothetical sub-project might involve the design of testing materials; the development of suitable testing apparatus; the selection of a suitable group of schools to be involved in the project; liaison with the schools; selection and screening of suitable children within each school; administration of the tests; processing of test results; writing of reports and papers.
  • What skills are needed to carry out the activities.
  • What resources will be used in the sub-project. This should be separated into two lists, resources that are already available and new resources that must be paid for by the grant. These lists should go beyond the obvious resources of equipment and consumables and include things like your time and the time of other staff who would be involved, which should be quantified both because some funders will treat it as a cost that can be funded from the grant and because your employer may need to know what they are committing to the project. They should also include facilities that may be needed like laboratories. In our hypothetical sub-project on child development it could also include the relationships which you will have established with schools that provide you with research participants – if you have them, otherwise you will need to budget for the work that must be done to build such relationships.

These 5 lists are what I call the ‘outline’. They include all the information you will need about a sub-project in order to write about it as part of a research grant. I strongly recommend that you develop the habit of turning your ideas about possible research projects into a catalogue of sub-projects. The essence of the outline is that you maintain the 5 lists for each sub-project. As soon as you have a few sub-projects you can consider whether you have enough to generate a coherent and fundable research project. I will tell you how to make that decision in my next post.