The Grant Writer's Handbook

How to Write a Research Proposal and Succeed

Gerard M Crawley, Eoin O'Sullivan

• Verlag: ICP
• Jahr: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781783267613
• Thema: Ciencias físicas
• Thema: Física

The Grant Writer's Handbook: How to Write a Research Proposal and Succeed provides useful and practical advice on all aspects of proposal writing, including developing proposal ideas, drafting the proposal, dealing with referees, and budgeting. The authors base their advice on many years of experience writing and reviewing proposals in many different countries at various levels of scientific maturity. The book describes the numerous kinds of awards available from funding agencies, in particular large collaborative grants involving a number of investigators, and addresses the practical impact of a grant, which is often required of proposals. In addition, information is provided about selection of reviewers and the mechanics of organizing a research grant competition to give the proposal writer the necessary background information. The book includes key comments from a number of experts and is essential reading for anyone writing a research grant proposal.

The Grant Writer's Handbook: How to Write a Research Proposal and Succeed provides useful and practical advice on all aspects of proposal writing, including developing proposal ideas, drafting the proposal, dealing with referees, and budgeting. The authors base their advice on many years of experience writing and reviewing proposals in many different countries at various levels of scientific maturity. The book describes the numerous kinds of awards available from funding agencies, in particular large collaborative grants involving a number of investigators, and addresses the practical impact of a grant, which is often required of proposals. In addition, information is provided about selection of reviewers and the mechanics of organizing a research grant competition to give the proposal writer the necessary background information. The book includes key comments from a number of experts and is essential reading for anyone writing a research grant proposal.

Readership: Graduate students and researchers looking to obtain and manage research grants.
Key Features:

• Provides practical advice on writing a research grant proposal and includes many key comments from experienced researchers and reviewers
• Authors have extensive experience in a number of countries with reviewing proposals from local scientists
• Book covers all aspects of writing and managing a grant with examples drawn from a variety of countries

Chapter One

Introduction

You have to learn the rules of the game. And then you have to play better than anyone else.

— Albert Einstein

This book is designed as a guide to writing grant proposals, aimed at researchers with varying levels of research grant experience. Although primarily aimed at early career researchers applying for their first grant, this book will also be useful for postdoctoral researchers helping their supervisors prepare proposals, as well as researchers in countries with emerging research funding systems that do not have a long history of competitive peer review.

In particular, the book shares important insights, experiences and practices which can help grant applicants communicate the novelty, strengths and importance of their research ideas. It also provides researchers with tips for how to convey their competence to plan, manage and deliver on their research program.

The book takes readers through the entire grant application cycle, from generating the initial research ideas to formulating the research question, drafting (and redrafting!) the proposal, the review process, and responding to reviewers’ comments. All the main sections of a grant application are considered in detail, including how to write an effective abstract, provide the right level of technical detail in the methodology section, effectively highlight the strengths of the research team, design a convincing budget, and explain the future impact of the research.

Important lessons are illustrated with real examples from successful (and unsuccessful!) grant applications. Key messages are emphasized with quotes from reviewers, and there are insights from funding agency officials from a range of organizations around the world. This guide to ‘grantsmanship’ aims to share insights into the thinking of experienced reviewers: what appeals to them and what turns them off, what is likely to encourage them to either recommend funding or decline a proposal.

1.1 Why This Book is Needed?

The skills and knowledge needed to write a successful grant proposal are not the same as those required to be a good researcher. Being a good researcher is a necessary but not sufficient condition for writing a convincing grant application. Typically, the additional skills and insights required to write a competitive proposal are learned through experience, rather than being taught by research mentors or shared by research administrators.

To address these challenges, this book collects and shares important tips, useful examples and effective practices to help in writing a grant proposal that can persuade individual reviewers, review panels and funders that your research idea, track record and project plan are worth investing in.

Developing a compelling grant application requires an ability to engage the reviewers. It should convey the excitement of the research idea and its potential impact, while setting it in the context of the broader research field. A strong application will grab the readers’ attention from the beginning of the proposal, and maintain their interest and excitement throughout the document. A successful grant proposal will also persuade the reviewers that the applicant has the ability to manage his or her grant. It should make clear that the applicant has the capability and competence to build an effective research plan, manage the research team and resources, and deliver on the project’s goals. So while this book is primarily intended as a ‘how to’ guide for writing grant proposals, it does offer some effective practices for managing research projects as well.

The book captures some of the most important grant-writing techniques and practices from different countries that have established, sophisticated research systems. Over the years, researchers in these countries have learned many lessons about how to effectively communicate their research ideas to reviewers. Experienced and successful grant-writers will have developed an intuition about the right level of technical detail to include, what annoys reviewers and what convinces them.

The book also gathers insights and advice from countries with emerging research systems, especially those that have only recently adopted competitive peer review-based approaches for allocating research funding. Researchers in these countries may have to develop new approaches for communicating the quality, novelty and impact of their proposed research. In particular, this book shares key messages from international experts who have been involved in assessing grant applications or managing new research grant competitions in such countries, and who have therefore seen feedback from reviewers at first hand. These experts are well placed to identify some of the most common mistakes and misconceptions made by researchers applying to peer-reviewed grant competitions for the first time.

Investment in basic and applied research is rising rapidly around the world, not only in established ‘knowledge-based’ economies, but in many middle-income and developing countries. Many of these investments are driven by efforts to stimulate economic productivity and growth. Consequently, researchers may increasingly be challenged to explain the value of their research in terms of industrial or socio-economic impact. This book also provides guidance on how to convincingly communicate the planned outputs, outcomes and future impact of a research project.

1.2 Who is This Book For?

This book is aimed primarily at early career researchers applying for their first grant. It will also be useful for other researchers, from postdoctoral researchers helping their supervisors prepare proposals, to more established researchers in countries with less experience of competitive peer review-based funding programs.

The book focuses on sharing practices for applying to funding agencies supporting research in scientific and technical disciplines, and learning lessons from other proposals. In particular, the book includes examples from the natural sciences and engineering, as well as medicine, the social sciences, economics and management. We have not included examples from the humanities and the arts, although many of the key messages will be pertinent to these fields.

The experience of the authors is that many of the proposals we have reviewed, especially from younger researchers or researchers in countries with emerging research systems, lack some of the fundamental concepts of what constitutes a good proposal and include many basic mistakes in a proposal prepared for peer review. We believe that this book will provide a service to grant proposal writers in trying to help avoid many of the potential pitfalls in preparing a proposal.

In addition, the authors believe that the book will be useful to the staff of the research agencies (especially recently established funding organizations). Many of the staff of these agencies may have little experience with organizing peer-reviewed competitions as a means of allocating research funding, and we believe that they will benefit from the insights provided in this volume.

The book should also be helpful to the administrators in universities and research institutions who support staff submitting research proposals to funding agencies, especially if these agencies are now using competitive peer-review processes involving international reviewers. Staff at new universities or other recently established research institutes — i.e., those which have not had much time to develop a ‘corporate memory’ of what makes a strong proposal or what are the most common grant-writing mistakes — should also find this book useful.

1.3 What’s in This Book?

This book shares experiences, insights and practices to help grant applicants effectively communicate the novelty and strengths of their research ideas in funding proposals. Key messages are emphasized with quotes from the experts we interviewed in the course of writing this book, and we paraphrase and synthesize quotes from reviews of actual proposals. We also illustrate important practices, with examples or ‘stories’ (both positive and negative) drawn from real grant applications. Although these examples have been modified to protect the identities of the original principal investigators (PIs), the lessons learned and the effective approaches they demonstrate have not. We hope that these examples, drawn from real life experience, will make the discussion more alive and meaningful for the reader.

Some of the quotes from experienced reviewers, the lists of ‘dos and do nots’ and the examples of good practice highlighted in this book may seem like common sense. However, the authors have seen enough proposals and reviews to know that the same mistakes are made over and over again. Even the very best researchers can make the most elementary grant-writing errors, and are perfectly capable of boring, annoying or confusing their reviewers.

In collecting these lessons, practices and ‘stories’, the authors have drawn upon their considerable experience in setting up grant competitions, managing peer-review processes, and reviewing proposals from a wide variety of countries (with research systems at different levels of maturity). We have also made use of our many contacts with successful grant writers in different research domains of the physical and biological sciences, engineering, social science, economics and management to obtain their insights about what makes a good research proposal in their particular field (and what issues they have seen that cause proposals to be unsuccessful). These interviews involved in-depth discussions with over 30 experienced reviewers and funding agency officials in several different countries. We also received significant input from younger researchers across a range of disciplines to better understand which aspects of the grant application process they struggle with and where they feel guidance would be most useful. In practice, we found general agreement on what makes a good proposal, independent of the home country of the reviewers and even, to some extent, of the discipline involved.

The book systematically goes through each step of proposal preparation and submission, from generating the initial research ideas, to formulating the research question, drafting and redrafting the proposal, understanding the review process, and responding to reviewers’ comments. Effective practices on how to approach all the main sections of a grant application form are considered in detail, including: how to write a compelling abstract; construct a literature review of the ‘state-of-the-art’; provide the right level of technical detail in the methodology section; effectively highlight the strengths of the research team (and collaborators); design a convincing budget; and explain the future impact of the research.

The careful reader may note that there is a certain amount of repetition in the book — the same advice is given more than once. Partly this is because we anticipate that the chapters in the book may well be read independently for help in specific areas. But even more importantly, our experience with teaching has taught us that repetition is often a very valuable tool in conveying a message.

1.4 How This Book is Organized?

The book is structured into 12 chapters plus appendices. In the next chapter, Chapter Two, we deal with the ‘main idea’ behind a proposal. As well as stressing the importance of having an excellent concept and research question to address, we offer some advice on how to generate ideas and keep current with your field.

In Chapter Three, we discuss the actual review process itself, since we believe that an understanding of the process will help the writers of proposals do a better job in actually presenting the material.

In Chapters Four to Nine we deal with various important sections of the proposal, including, referencing, the budget and the body of the proposal.

In Chapter Five, the authors of proposals are encouraged to allocate sufficient time to allow redrafting the proposal using friends and colleagues as critical readers. There is also a discussion of more complex proposals involving partnerships in Chapter Six.

Chapter Ten gives advice on how to respond to reviewers’ comments convincingly.

Chapter Eleven discusses approaches to applying for special kinds of proposals, e.g., for travel or equipment, or for early career investigators.

In Chapter Twelve some advice is presented on managing an award (and planning the next one), assuming that the proposal is funded. The ultimate goal is, of course, to continue to obtain research funding throughout a long and successful career.

Appendix One presents an outline of how to run a competitive grant competition. We anticipate that this should be helpful not only to prospective authors of proposals, but also to funding agency staff and the staff of research offices in universities and institutes.

Finally, Appendix Two provides a list of websites where international funding agencies provide advice on proposal preparation.

Chapter Two

The Research Idea

The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination

— Albert Einstein

EŰρηκα! [I have found it!]

— Archimedes

So here you are with fingers poised over the keyboard of your computer. It’s time to write that proposal to fund your new project. But where to start?

Any good proposal starts with an idea. If the author of a proposal does not have a good idea, no matter how polished the finished product, the proposal is not likely to have great success either with reviewers or with the agency providing the funding. This is the area where the author’s experience, knowledge of the subject matter, creativity and imagination most come into play.

2.1 What Makes a Good Idea for a Research Proposal?

Words that are often used in a call for proposals (CFP) from a funding agency, to describe the concepts they are looking to fund, are original, significant or even beyond state-of-the-art. Funders are looking for fresh ideas and not merely the ‘same old’ approaches that have been tried before.

What I look for in a good proposal is excitement. A proposal that is simply incremental turns me off.

— Quote from an experienced reviewer

Funding agencies want the projects they fund to make a difference to the development of the field, possibly leading to new directions or to solving a problem. Such problems exist in all fields, and finding ways to solve them is at the core of a good resea...

Inhaltsverzeichnis

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Glossary
• Contents
• Chapter One Introduction
• Chapter Two The Research Idea
• Chapter Three The Review Process
• Chapter Four Drafting the Proposal
• Chapter Five Re-Drafting the Proposal
• Chapter Six Partnerships
• Chapter Seven Impact
• Chapter Eight Referencing, Plagiarism and Intellectual Property
• Chapter Nine The Budget
• Chapter Ten Addressing Reviewers Comments
• Chapter Eleven Special Grant Competitions
• Chapter Twelve Managing the Award
• Appendix One Organizing a Research Proposal Competition
• Appendix Two General Advice/Guidance on Grant Writing: Links
• References
• Endword
• Index