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ONE
HOW TO BE A FUNDABLE RESEARCHER
Summary
This chapter helps you decide the best approach to winning grants, based on your research interests and career stage. It also helps you assess how your research might rank in the eyes of referees and grantsâ committee members who will decide whether your projects deserve funding.
There are two Tools in this chapter. The CV Builder Tool helps you identify aspects of your career that strengthen your position as a credible research grant applicant. The Defend Your Corner Tool can be used to help achieve perspective on your research field and understand how other academics might rate your work.
Introduction
Chasing research grants can be dispiriting and time consuming. Rejection letters are an almost inevitable part of a research career. With this in mind, you must ensure three things before you start writing research grant applications:
- You are a credible applicant for the grant you request. This means showing that you have the capabilities needed for every component of your proposed project.
- You ask a research question that the funding agency will want to have answered.
- You propose an organised programme of research activities that will answer the question.
The stark truth is that success rates for most grant schemes are often much less than 20 per cent and that writing a research grant application is extremely laborious. There is no point in submitting applications where there is no chance of winning the grant, however well crafted the proposal.
Your first grant-writing task is to find out how attractive you, your research area and your proposed projects are to funding agencies and their decision makers. This process has four elements:
- Are you eligible to apply?
- Is your research field easy to fund?
- Are you a credible applicant for your target funding scheme?
- Will your research topics and methods excite funding agency decision makers?
This chapter takes you through each of these to help you spot challenges that affect your chances of success.
Eligibility requirements
Rules governing whether individuals are permitted to apply for specific schemes vary significantly between funding agencies. Technical problems mean that you can waste time preparing applications that never make it past the agencyâs secretariat.
If you are a permanent employee of a recognised higher education or research institution and have residency and a home address in the country in which you are employed, you will find one or more funding schemes for which you are eligible. However, schemes vary widely in their eligibility criteria and you must be aware of the following:
Employer | While a higher education or recognised research institution is acceptable to the vast majority of funding agencies, some schemes require the project leader to be from the third sector, health service or industry. If you are an independent researcher you may find your options severely limited and you may need to find an eligible organisation willing to host your project or hire you. |
Employment status | Funding agencies generally require applicants to hold a formal contract or affiliation with the host institution that extends beyond the end date of the proposed project. |
Residency | Many schemes make residency (or proposed residency) in a particular country or countries a basic requirement for eligibility. |
Geography | Some funding agencies and schemes limit applicants to a particular geographical region. |
Career stage | This is typically expressed in years from PhD. Be aware that âearly careerâ can mean anything from one to twelve years from PhD. |
Collaboration | Schemes may be confined to research teams of a specified minimum size or may require the involvement of non-academic partners. |
The first example in this book illustrates the varying eligibility criteria of different funding agencies.
EXAMPLE 1
THE ELIGIBLE RESEARCHER
Here is an example of how eligibility criteria may vary using three funding agencies that support similar fields in the same country. The Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), the British Academy (the UKâs national academy for the humanities and social sciences) and the Leverhulme Trust (a charitable trust supporting research and education) are three of the main sources of research grants for humanitiesâ disciplines in the UK.
This table summarises some of the main differences in general eligibility criteria:
Funding Agency | Applicant Residency Requirements | Applicant Employment Status |
AHRC | UK residency | Employment (or equivalent) by recognised UK HE institution or research organisation. This must be in place from point of application until three months after proposed end date of grant. Contract researchers whose posts are fully funded by a research grant are ineligible.1 |
Leverhulme Trust | Not specified | Employment by a university, HE, FE institution or registered charity in the UK (and, in some cases, developing countries). The minimum employment contract must be for the duration of the proposed project. Contract researchers and retired academics who retain close links with their institution are both eligible to apply.2 |
British Academy | UK residency (for most schemes) | None specified for schemes that do not include overheads (full economic costing).3 |
NB. This information is indicative and prospective applicants should always check the current criteria for the relevant scheme before preparing an application. For more detail on how to find this sort of information about your target funding agencies, please refer to Appendix 2.
Check funding agency guidelines carefully before assuming you can apply to a particular scheme. If you do not seem to meet the criteria, check your status directly with the funding agency and your employer before writing your application. You should also check whether you meet your employerâs own eligibility criteria.
Your research field
Your key task as an eligible research grant applicant is to convince funding agency decision makers that your question is worth paying to have answered. In brief, all funding agencies want to invest in research projects that ask important questions.
However, what makes a question important varies according to funding agency. Each has its own set of criteria. The agencyâs website always features these prominently and it is foolish to start writing applications without referring to this information.
The task of choosing which applications best fit these criteria is carried out by a grantsâ committee, using reports written by expert referees. It is essential to understand some key points about these two groups before you start writing:
- The grantsâ committee is formed of members whose expertise covers a broad area of the agencyâs remit, although this may be uneven. There may be no representative of your field or discipline and not all of the members are necessarily academics.
- âExpertâ is a relative term when applied to peer review. A common assumption is that âexpertâ peer review means that referees have a complete and detailed understanding of the methods proposed and a boundless enthusiasm for the research question. In practice, they will know something about the field in question but they may not specialise in it.
Consequently, your proposed project may find no natural advocate as it goes through the funding agency assessment process. This is why your applications must create excitement and enthusiasm among non-partisan readers.
To this end, applicants have an advantage if they have a fair idea about possible referees or the likely composition of a gra...
