Although this website is new, I’ve been in business helping researchers achieve their research goals for 4 years now.

Every year, I spend most of May travelling to universities to give presentations about Research Grant Success and Managing Your Research Career. Last week I spoke at the University of Windsor for the 5th time. This week I spoke at St. FX University for the 1st time.

I enjoy these trips. It is great to meet researchers and answer their questions. I get immediate feedback and know that people come away with enthusiasm for their projects and ideas that will help them find the time.

My approach

Although I am hired by the university (usually the Office of Research Services but sometimes the Dean of Social Sciences and Humanities), my approach focuses on your goals.

You have research goals. Research is why you became an academic in the first place.

And research is the one thing you often struggle to fit into your day to day life. Not doing it makes you stressed. Institutional pressure just makes that stress worse.

This year, I am doing workshops.

The first one was in Windsor last Wednesday. And it went really well.

We did some brainstorming exercises to figure out where the debate each participant wants to contribute to was happening and identify journals (and presses) where they should be publishing. We looked at their current publications and work in progress. And we worked on clarifying their research objectives in preparation for a grant application.

Everyone came out of the workshop with a clear plan for the summer that included

• taking a vacation
• writing 2 or more articles
• preparing a grant application for the October 2009 SSHRC deadline

Some participants are also doing data collection or analysis, or attending an intensive summer institute.

A couple of participants are not ready to submit a grant this October and have plans to write more, plan their next project, and get themselves in a good position for October 2010.

Participants ranged from researchers finishing their first year in an academic position after completing a PhD, to a tenured associate professor with a substantial publications list and past grant success.

Afterwards I received this e-mail:

Thank you for yesterday. Even after all these years it is often hard to be objective about yourself.  You allowed me to create a realistic set of writing projects for the summer. (Patricia Weir, University of Windsor)

The approach you take to applying for research funding seems to depend, at least in part, on how you understand the granting process. My own approach to research planning, including applying for grants, is grounded in my own view of the process. And I frequently have to defend or explain this view to researchers, deans, and others.

This week, I would like to talk about the nature of the competition. I cannot take credit for the metaphor but I hope that using and explaining it will allow you to draw your own conclusions about how to approach your next grant application.

Tests

A good example of a test is getting a driving license. You take a test. You pass or fail. You get comments on how you did on different criteria. If you fail, you can work on the weak areas, retake the test, and get a license.

It doesn’t matter how anyone else taking the test performs. You are judged on your own performance against defined criteria. That’s it.

Most research funding competitions are not tests. The one exception might be found in funding for graduate school. I know of at least one university that offers funding (usually in the form of a tuition waiver and teaching assistantship) to all graduate students entering with a GPA above a defined level.

Lotteries

A lottery is the polar opposite of a test. There are no criteria. Your entry goes into a hat (or hat equivalent). Someone reaches in and randomly chooses one or more entries.

Winning a lottery is based on chance. The outcome is random. Mathematicians have done a lot of work on probability and random events. You can use that knowledge to try to improve your chances by, for example, buying more tickets or entering frequently. But the outcome is still random.

In a lottery there is no relationship between your action and the outcome.

To the best of my knowledge, no research funding opportunities are run as lotteries, though it can feel like they are sometimes. Especially when the competition is tough and a lot of excellent people and proposals are not getting funded.

Contests

In a contest, your performance does matter. But it is judged relative to others competing in the same contest. Sporting events are usually contests. You can run faster than you have ever run in your life and still not win a race.

The outcome of a contest is dependent on both your performance and the level of competition. Factors like the number of prizes as a proportion of all contestants and the average ability of contestants make a difference to your likelihood of success. But so does the performance of individual contestants on the day.

Most research funding opportunities are contests. There are a limited number of grants available. Applicants are ranked relative to other applicants. The best applicants will be awarded grants and others will not. I talked about the complexity of judging this particular race last week.

Using feedback

Just because research funding is allocated by contest, doesn’t mean feedback isn’t helpful. Elite athletes routinely review their performance in sporting events as they prepare for the next one. Interestingly they review successful performances as well as unsuccessful ones.

The key is not to treat feedback on an unsuccessful grant application as you would the feedback on a driving test.

Athletes have coaches. Elite athletes often have several for different aspects of their performance. They may have a regular coach but will have to work with a specific coach if they are chosen for the national team. They might have a personal trainer to work on regular fitness. They’ll have specific coaches and mentors for different aspects of their sport.

You are the academic equivalent of an elite athlete. You have personal goals. Your institution has goals. These coincide in many ways and thus your institution will provide support to help you achieve your goals (and theirs). You may also have other goals. You may find that training with friends and holding each other accountable keeps your performance up. You may want your own equivalent of a personal trainer or coach to help you build a strong research record and submit strong applications.

You need to submit your best application, just like an athlete needs to run their best race. But don’t be too cautious about entering. Placing in the middle of a race does not indicate that you should not have entered. It indicates that you have more work to do to win. The field changes every time. Some of the good runners have bad days.

Don’t be scared to compete. And don’t get discouraged if you don’t win.

If you need help

I can be your personal coach. Read my free e-book about writing and publishing. If my approach seems like a good fit for how you work, we can work together to make a plan and set up an accountability system.

Book an initial 20 minute consultation for only $30.

(all prices in Canadian funds)

I have been awaiting Michèle Lamont’s book, How Professors Think: Inside the Curious World of Academic Judgment, for a long time.

Her study of peer review in multi-disciplinary humanities and social science grant competitions in the US first came to my attention via the co-authored article “What is Originality in the Social Sciences and the Humanities?” in the American Sociological Review in 2004.

I credit that article for helping me articulate some of the issues that humanists face in translating the often scientistic language of grant instructions into something that makes sense for their projects. In my experience, differing understandings of originality are crucial to many of the differences in academic cultures between disciplines, and particularly between the humanities and other types of academic research.

How Professors Think complements that detailed account of originality with an examination of the process of evaluation in which “originality” becomes salient — the adjudication of applications to prestigious multidiscplinary fellowship competitions.

The study

Lamont has used observation and semi-structured qualitative interviews to examine the process of peer review in 5 prestigious US fellowship competitions. All of these are multidisciplinary panels in the humanities and social sciences. And they include awards to doctoral students as well as fellowships for more experienced scholars.

Lamont’s approach is situated within the symbolic interactionist tradition in sociology. As such she is interested in how meaning is produced through social interaction, in this case the meaning of “excellence”, “quality”, “significance”, “expertise”, “authority”, “method”, and other concepts central to academic judgment and the awarding of fellowships and grants.

If your interest is primarily in whether the grant review process is fair or objective, this book may not be of interest. However, if you are interested in how academics produce fair and objective decisions, you are in for a treat.

The complexity of evaluation

In my own presentations about the granting process, I often compare grant competitions to the Olympics. It is a competition in which applicants will be ranked in comparison to others who have submitted proposals to the same competition. However, unlike the Olympics, we do not have the benefit of super-accurate Swiss timepieces to measure the equivalent of hundredth of a second differences in performance.

In How Professors Think, Lamont paints a picture of the complex nature of those differences. Not only are panelists making fine distinctions between high quality proposals, but they are often comparing incommensurable projects. It is more like trying to judge a downhill skier, a slalom skier, and a figure skater in one competition and come up with a fair result based on excellence. Your Swiss timepiece would be useless, even if you had one.

One normative conclusion to be drawn from this observation is that it is pointless to attempt to collapse the many considerations that factor into funding decisions into a single matrix … Academia is a highly variegated world, one where qualitatively incommensurate proposals cannot be subsumed under a single standard. … Each and all of these standpoints enrich our understanding of what makes research a meaningful endeavor — and, likewise, shape the value we assign to the work of others. (Lamont, pp. 200)

Encouragingly, Lamont demonstrates that because those academics who serve on grant peer review panels believe in the fairness of the process and the existence of excellence, they work very hard to ensure that they proceed fairly and privilege excellence in their decision making.

What this means for you

As I have often said, there is no magic formula for a successful grant proposal. However, understanding the process can help you communicate your project and achievements in ways that enable panelists to recognize the value in a proposed program of research. And understanding how the context of evaluation affects the negotiation and production of fair decisions about excellence can also help you present your work better.

If you are interested in learning more about the process, particularly if you plan to submit an application to a multidisciplinary competition, How Professors Think would be a good place to start. Despite a thriving field of Science and Technology Studies, there is a dearth of material specifically on the practice of the humanities and social sciences. Lamont demonstrates that broadening such studies would be productive.

In my work supporting researchers, I draw on the research of Lamont and others, as well as my own experience to help social science and humanities academics achieve their research goals. How Professors Think has also reinforced my view that the national context also matters. The Canadian and UK contexts with which I am most familiar differ in some ways from the American context that Lamont describes. And yet there are also shared elements.

Peer review is important in all three national contexts. I will talk about some of the specific aspects of how peer review works in Canada in future posts. Subscribe to the newsletter to recieve these when they are published.

It’s that time of year… an occasional series of posts addressing issues that come up at particular points in the academic year. Grant deadlines. Beginning of term. End of term. Starting new jobs. I’ll address seasonal topics, with advice to help reduce your stress and work effectively towards your research goals.

This post: Receiving the decision on your SSHRC Standard Research Grant application

Did you apply for a Standard Research Grant (SRG) last October? You probably heard last week about the result, even though written notification, with comments, scores and all the rest, usually takes a few more weeks to come.

If you were successful.

CONGRATULATIONS! You now have more resources to achieve your research goals. (If not you can skip down to the next section. I’ve got help for you, too.)

Now the hard part comes in. You actually have to do more research and write more. You need to manage research assitants. Manage a budget. Arrange research trips. Do all the things that you haven’t been able to do because you didn’t have the money.

But before you can do all that, you have to get the money released into your account. That means getting the ethics approval and doing any other administrative tasks the university requires. If you don’t know what that is, talk to someone in the research office right away. Remember, they are responsible for ensuring that all the policies and procedures are followed. Yes it’ll be bureaucratic, but they are there to help you.

Next, get out your application and remind yourself of what you were going to do. Figure out what you’ve managed to do in the months since you submitted the application and any other things that have changed in your plans. The amount awarded might also differ from the amount you requested. That’s fine. There could be lots of reasons for that. It was a rough budget anyway.

You might want to write a fresh plan with a detailed budget that you can use to help you manage the research. If you have a graduate student with project management experience, you might want to hire them as a research assistant to help with this part of the project. Or hire someone who isn’t a student to do that specific task. As long as your new plan has the same objectives as the application, you are okay to make changes.

Now hire a research assistant and get going on year one of the project. Once you get that marking finished, you are going to want to dive right in. Have fun. You are on your way to doing what you always dreamed this job would be about.

If you weren’t successful

I’m really sorry. That always feels like a kick in the guts. But don’t take it personally. About 2/3 of the applicants weren’t successful. There just isn’t enough money in the budget. I’m sure you have an excellent project there.

This is a bit like the Olympics. Everyone who goes is a world class athlete but they only give medals to the top 3 in each event. Disappointing, but not the end of the world.

It is probably going to take some time to absorb the comments and figure out what to do next. There are a lot of pieces of paper in that package you received with your decision. Scores. Summaries. Commitee comments. External assessors’ comments.

And some of that stuff is written in bureacratic safety speak. You know, the kind of thing you write when you want to give reasons and helpful feedback but you also need to avoid people making appeals? Like the letters that Human Resources send out to unsuccessful job applicants. Helpful enough that you don’t want them to stop sending them. But obscure enough to be maddening.

So don’t worry if it all just seems unfair and awful at first. Take some time to absorb the news. And when you are ready, come back to it and this post, and I’ll help you get something useful from it.

Your score

This is important. And it is found at the bottom of the page that has the commitee comments on it. You will have a score for your record of achievement and another for the project. Both of these will be out of 6.

You can use these two scores to identify which aspect of your application needs more work. If your record of achievement score is low, it doesn’t matter how much you improve the project proposal, you still won’t get funding.

Those scores are relative. They are really only meaningful in the context of that committee in that year. They are a means of ranking applicants in relation to each other.

There will be a total score out of 12 but it won’t be the sum of the two scores out of 6. This is because the record of achievement counts for more. But your score out of 12, when compared to the “score of the last funded application” on the summary page, can help you work out how far away you were. If you were in the middle third, called the “alternate list” or “4A”, you will also have a rank. Again, this helps you work out whether you were so close that you don’t need to do much before reapplying or whether you need to make substantial improvements to be competitive.

Your Options

If you were close, you will probably want to resubmit in October. Check that some of the forthcoming publications are now out and that there are a couple more things in the pipeline. And maybe spend a week tidying up the proposal part. But, depending on how close you were, you don’t want to spend the whole summer tweaking details. Your perfectionist tendencies can quickly turn into a liability here. Set a limit for how much time you will spend on this and then just get on with other research and writing projects over the summer.

If you were further off, and your record of achievement score is the problem, you might want to wait a year before reapplying. Look at your updated publications list and try to self-assess how much of an improvement there is. If your publications are still a bit light (either in number or in the quality of the journals or presses where you have published) then put the application aside. Get out your writing plan and spend the summer working on a few more pieces. Aim to submit at least two things by the end of the summer and have at least one more to the stage where it needs lots of little stuff doing that you can do in term time. If you have some internal research funds, hire an RA to help with literature reviews (or at least producing annotated bibliographies), fact checking, reference checking, proofing, getting the finished version into the prefered style of the journal you are targetting, etc.

If the problem was the project proposal, you may be able to resubmit in October or you may want to wait a year. If it is primarily that you did not communicate clearly enough, rewrite the proposal, addressing the committee’s concerns, and try again. Get feedback from colleagues. Try to make time to do some other writing and research, too.

If the committee has issues with the methodology or feels that the project is not well developed enough, you might want to devote this summer to conducting some preliminary research to strengthen the proposal before resubmitting. Making preliminary visits to archives to familiarize yourself with the holdings can be very beneficial to a future application, and might give you some material to work on in the meantime. Conducting pilot interviews or testing a survey instrument and then refining the data collection methods can also make a big difference. Even conducting some preliminary analyses on pilot data can help. Again, if you have internal funds, hire a research assistant to help with some of this.

Need help?

I am offering a webinar, Now What?, to guide you through the package of comments and help you figure out your next steps. My goal is to reduce the stress caused by uncertainty and help you come up with a workable plan to achieve your research goals. In it I will go through the various scores and comments with you helping you work out how to get the most out of them. I’ll also go into more detail about your options. And you will have an opportunity to ask questions about your specific situation.

You will also receive copies of two e-books. Publish or Perish? focuses on your record of achievement, explaining how your publications list is evaluated and helping you make a writing and publishing plan (read an excerpt here). Writing Your SSHRC Grant Proposal focuses on the research proposal part of the application. In it, I guide you through the various appendices to an application helping you communicate your proposal effectively.

The presentation is scheduled for 90 minutes to allow plenty of time for questions and discussion. You will need a phone and a computer connected to the internet. Details of the call-in number and how to view the Power Point slides will be sent on registration. You will need to pay long-distance charges in addition to the course fee. (If you are reading this in an e-mail or feed reader, you need to click through to purchase.)

Thursday May 7, 1 p.m Eastern Daylight Time  $60

Monday June 15, 1 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time $60

Want more info about the webinar: click here.

The January 2009 Canadian Federal budget announcement has more than a few people up in arms. Core budgets for the three granting councils were cut based on a review of their processes. New funding is primarily for infrastructure and graduate students. And a lot of that new funding is targeted in controversial ways.

In the social sciences and humanities community, there has been an outcry over the targeting of new Canada Graduate Scholarships to those studying in Management, Business, and Finance. SSHRC has clarified that this only applies to the new money, and that scholarships are still available to graduate students across the full range of the humanities and social sciences.

While this might allay the fears of some young scholars that they will never secure funding to pursue their research, it does nothing to address the central criticism. Is it right to limit government funding of research to certain fields that are deemed relevant?

Targeted Funding

The targeting of new CGS scholarship money is but the latest manifestation of a longer term trend. The 2007 federal budget targeted approximately $10 million of research grant funding for the same area — Management, Business, and Finance. The 2008 federal budget targeted similar levels of new research grant funding to research on the Environment and Northern Communities. An earlier program provided about $10 million over 5 years to fund research on the New Economy.

SSHRC’s core budget has not increased significantly in a long time. The Standard Research Grant program, which adjudicate applications based on peer review of the quality and likely significance of the proposed research, has not been able to increase funding to meet increased demand or the increased costs of research.

Increased demand

And demand is increasing. The number of applications to the Standard Research Grant program has been increasing steadily. Universities that have strong research reputations are expecting more of their faculty to secure external research funding, earlier in their careers. And universities that have traditionally focused on undergraduate teaching are trying to increase their research profile, including bringing in more external funding.

Core funding from provincial budgets for higher education is increasingly targeted to teaching activities, with additional funds targeted to specific areas including infrastructure and commercialization of research. Universities have fewer funds available to distribute internally to support research. One way they manage that scarcity is to use internal funds as seed money to leverage larger external research grants. The pressure to apply for grants increases.

The result of this is that success rates in the Standard Research Grant program have been dropping. Until 2006, SSHRC was able to maintain a success rate of around 40% although in the final year of that regime an across the board cut to proposed budgets had to be imposed. Since then success rates have been in the 33% range. Without an increase in core funding, this situation is only going to get worse.

Program death

The Standard Research Grant program is slowly starving to death. It could take years. And it is still funding a lot of excellent research in a full range of social science and humanities areas. But the value of this program needs to be argued to the people that make the decisions. That isn’t SSHRC. That is the federal Minister of Industry (to whom SSHRC and NSERC report) and your own MP.

And while everyone’s attention is focused on targeting and graduate scholarships, the cuts to the core budget based on Strategic Review have gone relatively unnoticed. MacLean’s blog reports on the responses to the budget. I’m surprised that I haven’t heard more about  this detail:

SSHRC funding is eliminated for Research Time Stipends (RTS)-funds that help to provide adequate time for faculty to conduct research. SSHRC recognizes the central importance of time for research in the social sciences and humanities but also recognizes that universities have the responsibility to provide university grant award-holders with adequate time for research.

The Research Time Stipend program has been on death row for years. And the program is small. Only those in about the top 10% (or less) of the Standard Research Grant program ever received RTS funding.

The argument is solid. If research is part of the normal workload of university faculty, then their employers (the universities) should ensure that faculty have adequate time to undertake these duties. And yet universities do not have large pots of cash from which to fund a replacement. Small universities have been complaining about this situation, hoping that RTS could be used to level the playing field for them. It is now level in a way no one wanted.

What this means for you

Federal funding. SSHRC budget cuts. It all seems quite distant from your daily life of teaching, research and service.

And yet this is the context in which you have to secure the resources to achieve your research goals. Resources of money, time, and research assistants. This big picture makes your life more stressful.

You are likely to be under more pressure to apply for research grants that are harder to get. The one thing you want is time, and that is the one thing a SSHRC grant won’t fund. It is kind of hard to love your job when the part that drew you into it in the first place is getting squeezed into the margins. Or at least it feels like it’s getting squeezed into the margins.

Stress is caused by uncertainty and lack of control. Understanding this bigger picture, as well as how peer review committees evaluate your application, can reduce your uncertainty and focus your attention on the areas over which you do have control. You can’t do a lot to influence the federal budget (though writing to your MP about the importance of funding social science and humanities research couldn’t hurt) but you can make sure that any application you do submit is competitive.

My Research Grant Success webinar will reduce funding-induced stress. I will help you understand the big picture and focus on your own needs for research funding. We’ll talk about the main components of a successful grant application and I’ll provide a workbook so you can apply what you’ve learned to your own research program. Remove the stress and work towards achieving your research goals. Register now for only $50.

If those dates are not convenient, subscribe here to receive an e-mail when future dates for this presentation are announced. (You will only receive notifications of Research Grant Success webinar dates.)