{"id":70515,"date":"2023-11-01T00:08:33","date_gmt":"2023-11-01T04:08:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/world.edu\/?p=70515"},"modified":"2023-11-01T00:08:33","modified_gmt":"2023-11-01T04:08:33","slug":"scoring-your-funding-proposal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/world.edu\/scoring-your-funding-proposal\/","title":{"rendered":"Scoring your funding proposal"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Funders can seem a little like the Oracle of Delphi in ancient Greece. For four centuries, supplicants approached the Oracle, seeking wisdom and hoping for prophecies of good fortune. No one was entirely sure how she arrived at her decision. All were slightly fearful. None looked too closely or too directly at her. But all knew the outcome was final: there was no appeal process.<\/p>\n

However, the process for funders making their decisions \u2013 and the rationale underlying it \u2013 isn\u2019t necessarily as opaque as it may seem at first. As\u00a0Lewis et al. (2019)<\/a>\u00a0made clear, \u2018every funder has a mission statement that declares the scope of research they are interested in, and many funders have statements about their current priorities. Read. Those. Statements. Carefully. And incorporate them into your proposals\u2019. As well as Reading. These. Statements. Carefully, you should also take time to understand how the funders work so that you have an idea of the process it will go through.<\/span><\/p>\n

There are several different ways that organisations may select applications for funding. Generally, there\u2019s a panel of reviewers or assessors and they judge the applications according to the funding scheme\u2019s selection criteria. The composition of the reviewing panel can be quite diverse. Sometimes, the members are all academics. Other times, it\u2019s a blend of academics, funding organisation executives, stakeholders or community leaders.<\/p>\n

A significant number of funders of research opt for peer review when it comes to selecting applications. Peer review of grant applications differs from peer review of journal articles in one important way \u2013 it is \u2018single-blind\u2019. The reviewers know the identity of the applicants, but the applicants are not told the identity of their reviewers. The identity of the applicants is revealed because it can have a significant bearing on the feasibility of the research proposed. The identity of the reviewers is protected so that they can speak frankly, without fear of reprisals from the applicants.<\/p>\n

How do the reviewers make the decision about the viability and excellence of your research? How can they tell if your project fits the purpose of the funder\u2019s scheme? In this post, we look at the criteria the funders use to assess applications, and how these criteria may make or break your proposal at the different stages of the assessment process.<\/p>\n

Abdoul et al. (2012)<\/a>\u00a0examined the use of criteria by a range of French and international funding organisations, including the regional Programme Hospitalier de Recherche Clinique (PHRCs), the Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR), the US National Institutes of Health, UK Medical Research Council (MRC), Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHRMC) in Australia and the European Science Foundation (ESF).<\/p>\n

In the 14 calls they looked at, all had a set range of criteria (between three and eight, with the median being five), and all had some form of scoring for these. Abdoul et al. created a \u2018typology\u2019, grouping together the criteria that funders in their study used.\u00a0Hug and Aeschbach (2020)<\/a>\u00a0undertook a similar analysis, mapping criteria against the parts of the proposal. Both are a useful way of thinking about what funders see as important for judging the value and plausibility of applications. For Abdoul et al., the nine broad categories of criteria are as follows:<\/p>\n

Most commonly used<\/b><\/p>\n