Funding | Cash for Questions: Research funding, policy and development

Coping with rejection: What to do if your grant application is unsuccessful. Part 1: Understand what it means…. and what it doesn’t mean

You can't have any research funding. In this life, or the next....

Some application and assessment processes are for limited goods, and some are for unlimited goods, and it’s important to understand the difference. PhD vivas and driving tests are assessments for unlimited goods – there’s no limit on how many PhDs or driving licenses can be issued. In principle, everyone could have one if they met the requirements. You’re not going to fail your driving test because there are better drivers than you. Other processes are for limited goods – there is (usually) only one job vacancy that you’re all competing for, only so many papers that a top journal accept, and only so much grant money available.

You’d think this was a fairly obvious point to make. But talking to researchers who have been unsuccessful with a particular application, there’s sometimes more than a hint of hurt in their voices as they discuss it, and talk in terms of their research being rejected, or not being judged good enough. They end up taking it rather personally. And given the amount of time and effort that must researchers put into their applications, that’s not surprising.

It reminds me of an unsuccessful job applicant whose opening gambit at a feedback meeting was to ask me why I didn’t think that she was good enough to do the job. Well, my answer was that I was very confident that she could do the job, it’s just that there was someone more qualified and only one post to fill. In this case, the unsuccessful applicant was simply unlucky – an exceptional applicant was offered the job, and nothing she could have said or done (short of assassination) would have made much difference. While I couldn’t give the applicant the job she wanted or make the disappointment go away, I could at least pass on the panel’s unanimous verdict on her appointability. My impression was that this restored some lost confidence, and did something to salve the hurt and disappointment. You did the best that you could. With better luck you’ll get the next one.

Of course, with grant applications, the chances are that you won’t get to speak to the chair of the panel who will explain the decision. You’ll either get a letter with the decision and something about how oversubscribed the scheme was and how hard the decisions were, which might or might not be true. Your application might have missed out by a fraction, or been one of the first into the discard pile.

Some funders, like the ESRC, will pass on anonymised referees’ comments, but oddly, this isn’t always constructive and can even damage confidence in the quality of the peer review process. In my experience, every batch of referees’ comments will contain at least one weird, wrong-headed, careless, or downright bizarre comment, and sometimes several. Perhaps a claim about the current state of knowledge that’s just plain wrong, a misunderstanding that can only come from not reading the application properly, and/or criticising it on the spurious grounds of not being the project that they would have done. These apples are fine as far as they go, but they should really taste of oranges. I like oranges.

Don’t get me wrong – most referees’ reports that I see are careful, conscientious, and insightful, but it’s those misconceived criticisms that unsuccessful applicants will remember. Even ahead of the valid ones. And sometimes they will conclude that its those wrong criticisms that are the reason for not getting funded. Everything else was positive, so that one negative review must be the reason, yes? Well, maybe not. It’s also possible that that bizarre comment was discounted by the panel too, and the reason that your project wasn’t funded was simply that the money ran out before they reached your project. But we don’t know. I really, really, really want to believe that that’s the case when referees write that a project is “too expensive” without explaining how or why. I hope the panel read our carefully constructed budget and our detailed justification for resources and treat that comment with the fECing contempt that it deserves.

Fortunately, the ESRC have announced changes to procedures which allow not only a right of reply to referees, but also to communicate the final grade awarded. This should give a much stronger indication of whether it was a near miss or miles off. Of course, the news that an application was miles off the required standard may come gifted wrapped with sanctions. So it’s not all good news.

But this is where we should be heading with feedback. Funders shouldn’t be shy about saying that the application was a no-hoper, and they should be giving as much detail as possible. Not so long ago, I was copied into a lovely rejection letter, if there’s any such thing. It passed on comments, included some platitudes, but also told the applicant what the overall ranking was (very close, but no cigar) and how many applications there were (many more than the team expected). Now at least one of the comments was surprising, but we know the application was taken seriously and given a thorough review. And that’s something….

So… in conclusion…. just because your project wasn’t funded doesn’t (necessarily) mean that it wasn’t fundable. And don’t take it personally. It’s not personal. Just the business of research funding.

New year’s wishes….

The new calendar year is traditionally a time for reflection and for resolutions, but in a fit of hubris I’ve put together a list of resolutions I’d like to see for the sector, research funders, and university culture in general. In short, for everyone but me. But to show willing, I’ll join in too.

No more of the following, please….

1. “Impactful”

Just…. no. I don’t think of myself a linguistic purist or a grammar-fascist, though I am a pedant for professional purposes. I recognise that language changes and evolves over time, and I welcome changes that bring new colour and new descriptive power to our language. While I accept that the ‘impact agenda’ is here to stay for the foreseeable future, the ‘impactful’ agenda need not be. The technical case against this monstrosity of a word is outlined at Grammarist, but surely the aesthetic case is conclusive in itself. I warn anyone using this word in my presence that I reserve the right to tell them precisely how annoyful they’re being.

2. The ‘Einstein fallacy’

This is a mistaken and misguided delusion that a small but significant proportion of academics appear to be suffering from. It runs a bit like this:
1) Einstein was a genius
2) Einstein was famously absent-minded and shambolic in his personal organisation
3) Conclusion: If I am or pretend to be absent-minded and shambolic , either:
(3a) I will be a genius; or
(3b) People will think I am a genius; or
(3c) Both.

I accept that some academics are genuinely bad at administration and organisation. In some cases it’s a lack of practice/experience, in others a lack of confidence, and I accept that this is just not where their interests and talent lies. Fair enough. But please stop being deliberately bad at it to try to impress people. Oh, you can only act like a prima donna if you have the singing skills to back it up…

3) Lack of predictability in funding calls

Yes, I’m looking at you, ESRC. Before the comprehensive spending review and all of the changes that followed from that, we had a fairly predictable annual cycle of calls, very few of which had very early autumn deadlines. Now we’re into a new cycle which may or may not be predictable, and a lot of them seem to be very early in the academic year. Sure, let’s have one off calls on particular topics, but let’s have a predictable annual cycle for everything else with as much advance notice as possible. It’ll help hugely with ‘demand management’ because it’ll be much easier to postpone applications that aren’t ready if we know there will be another call. For example, I was aware of a couple of very strong seminar series ideas which needed further work and discussion within the relevant research and research-user communities. My advice was to start that work now using the existence of the current call as impetuous, and to submit next year. But we’ve taken a gamble, as we don’t know if there will be another call in the future, and you can’t tell me because apparently a decision has yet to be made.

4) Lazy “please forward as appropriate” emails

Stuff sent to me from outside the Business School with the expectation that I’ll just send it on to everyone. No. Email overload is a real problem, and I write most of my emails with the expectation that I have ten seconds at most either to get the message across, or to earn an attention extension. I mean, you’re not even reading this properly are you? You’re probably skim reading this in case there’s a nugget of wit amongst the whinging. Every email I sent creates work for others, and every duff, dodgy, or irrelevant email I send reduces my e-credit rating. I know for a fact that at least some former colleagues deleted everything I sent without reading it – there’s no other explanation I can think of for missing two emails with the header including the magic words “sabbatical leave”.

So… will I be spending my e-credit telling my colleagues about your non-business school related event which will be of interested to no-one? No, no, and most assuredly no. I will forward it “as appropriate”, if by “appropriate” you mean my deleted items folder.

Sometimes, though, a handful of people might be interested. Or quite a lot of people might be interested, but it’s not worth an individual email. Maybe I’ll put it on the portal, or include it in one of my occasional news and updates emails. Maybe.

If you’d like me to do that, though, how about sending me the message in a form I can forward easily and without embarrassment? With a meaningful subject line, a succinct and accurate summary in the opening two sentences? So that I don’t have to do it for you before I feel I can send it on. There’s a lovely internet abbreviation – TL:DR – which stands for Too Long: Didn’t Read. I think its existence tells us something.

5) People who are lucky enough to have interesting, rewarding and enjoyable jobs with an excellent employer and talented and supportive colleagues, who always manage to find some petty irritants to complain about, rather than counting their blessings.

Dear rail companies….

"Good morning, look you, Jones-the-absolute-ripoff"

Dear rail companies,

Just a quick note of appreciation for your wildly unpredictable and logic-defying pricing structure. I enjoy trying to navigate the labyrinthine maze of different fares whenever I want to travel. I highly recommend the Semi-Super Saver Single Return Railroader Autumn Summer Traveller Student Nurse District Pet Family Oxbow Lake Pass incidentally.

It’s irritating enough doing this for myself, but it’s even more annoying when trying to cost a research project involving a lot of train trips. The project could be fairly cheap, or it could be massively expensive, depending upon brute luck, how organised academic colleagues are in requesting tickets, how soon the administrators can book them through the special magical portal of trail travel that universities seem to have, what time academics have to leave/arrive, and whether Mars is in the ascendant. Do we go optimistic, take an intermediate position, or take a wildly pessimistic one? Travel costs could end up being negligible in relation to the project as a whole, or run to a significant share of expenses. We could end up returning a fairly substantial slice of cash, or we could run out of money and/or cut the project activities short.

Guess what, rail companies? The rest of the budget is predictable. So why are you making life difficult? You don’t get research associates charging extra for work before 9:30, or offering to work for substantially less if you tell them what to do six weeks in advance. Transcription costs aren’t more expensive if the tapes leave London via Waterloo rather than St Pancreas International. Overheads aren’t more expensive in peak hours.

All this is bad enough. And then one train company – I’m looking at you, East Midlands Trains – makes it worse by plastering adverts featuring Jedward all over every phone box in the Greater Nottingham area. Damn you all. Damn you all to hell. On an apex network first advance single.

Outstanding researcher or Oustanding grant writer?

The Times Higher has a report on Sir Paul Nurse‘s ‘Anniversary Day’ address to the Royal Society. Although the Royal Society is a learned society in the natural rather than the social sciences, he makes an interesting distinction that seems to have – more or less unchallenged – become a piece of received wisdom across many if not all fields of research.

Here’s part of what Sir Paul had to say (my underline added)

Given this emphasis on the primacy of the individuals carrying out the research, decisions should be guided by the effectiveness of the researchers making the research proposal. The most useful criterion for effectiveness is immediate past progress. Those that have recently carried out high quality research are most likely to continue to do so. In coming to research funding decisions the objective is not to simply support those that write good quality grant proposals but those that will actually carry out good quality research. So more attention should be given to actual performance rather than planned activity. Obviously such an emphasis needs to be tempered for those who have only a limited recent past record, such as early career researchers or those with a break in their careers. In these cases making more use of face-to-face interviews can be very helpful in determining the quality of the researcher making the application.

I guess my first reaction to this is to wonder whether interviews are the best way of deciding research funding for early career researchers. Apart from the cost, inconvenience and potential equal opportunities issues of holding interviews, I wonder if they’re even a particularly good way of making decisions. When it comes to job interviews, I’ve seen many cases where interview performance seems to take undue priority over CV and experience. And if the argument is that sometimes the best researchers aren’t the best communicators (which is fair), it’s not clear to me how an interview will help.

My second reaction is to wonder about the right balance between funding excellent research and funding excellent researchers. And I think this is really the point that Sir Paul is making. But that’s a subject for another entry, another time. Coming soon!

My third reaction – and what this entry is about – is the increasingly common assumption that there is one tribe of researchers who can write outstanding applications, and another which actually does outstanding research. One really good expression of this can be found in a cartoon at the ever-excellent Research Counselling. Okay, so it’s only a cartoon, but it wouldn’t have made it there unless it was tapping into some deeper cultural assumptions. This article from the Times Higher back at the start of November speaks of ‘Dr Plods’ – for whom getting funding is an aim in itself – and ‘Dr Sparks’ – the ones who deserve it – and there seems to be little challenge from readers in the comments section below.

But does this assumption have any basis in fact? Are those who get funded mere journeymen and women researchers, mere average intellects, whose sole mark of distinction is their ability to toady effectively to remote and out-of-touch funding bodies? To spot the research priority flavour-of-the-month from the latest Delivery Plan, and cynically twist their research plans to match it? It’s a comforting thought for the increasingly large number of people who don’t get funding for their project. We’d all like to be the brilliant-but-eccentric-misunderstood-radical-unappreciated genius, who doesn’t play by the rules, cuts a few corners but gets the job done, and to hell with the pencil pushers ~~at the DA’s office in city hall~~ in RCUK’s offices in downtown Swindon. A weird kind of cross between Albert Einstein and Jimmy McNulty from ‘The Wire’.

While I don’t think anyone is seriously claiming that the Sparks-and-Plods picture should be taken literally, I’m not even sure how much truth there is in it as a parable or generalisation. For one thing, I don’t see how anyone could realistically Plod their way very far from priority to priority as they change and still have a convincing track record for all of them. I’m sure that a lot of deserving proposals don’t get funded, but I doubt very much that many undeserving proposals do get the green light. The brute fact is that there are more good ideas than there is money to spend on funding them, and the chances of that changing in the near future are pretty much zero. I think that’s one part of what’s powering this belief – if good stuff isn’t being funded, that must be because mediocre stuff is being funded. Right? Er, well…. probably not. I think the reality is that it’s the Sparks who get funded, but it’s those Sparks who are better able to communicate their ideas and make a convincing case for fit with funders’ or scheme priorities. Plods, and their ‘incremental’ research (a term that damns with faint praise in some ESRC referee’s reports that I’ve seen) shouldn’t even be applying to the ESRC – or at least not to the standard Research Grants scheme.

A share of this Sparks/Plods view is probably caused by the impact agenda. If impact is hard for the social sciences, it’s at least ten times as hard for basic research in many of the natural sciences. I can understand why people don’t like the impact agenda, and I can understand why people are hostile. However, I’ve always understood the impact agenda as far as research funding applications are concerned is that if a project has the potential for impact, it ought to, and there ought to be a good, solid, thought through, realistic, and defensible plan for bringing it about. If there genuinely is no impact, argue the case in the impact statement. Consider this, from the RCUK impact FAQ.

How do Pathways to Impact affect funding decisions within the peer review process?

The primary criterion within the peer review process for all Research Councils is excellent research. This has always been the case and remains unchanged. As such, problematic research with an excellent Pathways to Impact will not be funded. There are a number of other criteria that are assessed within research proposals, and Pathways to Impact is now one of those (along with e.g. management of the research and academic beneficiaries).

Of course, how this plays out in practice is another matter, but every indication I’ve had from the ESRC is that this is taken very seriously. Research excellence comes first. Impact (and other factors) second. These may end up being used in tie-breakers, but if it’s not excellent, it won’t get funded. Things may be different at the other Research Councils that I know less about, especially the EPSRC which is repositioning itself as a sponsor of research, and is busy dividing and subdividing and prioritising research areas for expansion or contraction in funding terms.

It’s worth recalling that it’s academics who make decisions on funding. It’s not Suits in Swindon. It’s academics. Your peers. I’d be willing to take seriously arguments that the form of peer review that we have can lead to conservatism and caution in funding decisions. But I find it much harder to accept the argument that senior academics – researchers and achievers in their own right – are funding projects of mediocre quality but good impact stories ahead of genuinely innovative, ground-breaking research which could drive the relevant discipline forward.

But I guess my message to anyone reading this who considers herself to be more of a ‘Doctor Spark’ who is losing out to ‘Doctor Plod’ is to point out that it’s easier for Sparky to do what Ploddy does well than vice versa. Ploddy will never match your genius, but you can get the help of academic colleagues and your friendly neighbourhood research officer – some of whom are uber-Plods, which in at least some cases is a large part of the reason why they’re doing their job rather than yours.

Want funding? Maximise your chances of getting it. Want to win? Learn the rules of the game and play it better. Might your impact plan be holding you back? Take advantage of any support that your institution offers you – and if it does, be aware of the advantage that this gives you. Might your problem be the art of grant writing? Communicating your ideas to a non-specialised audience? To reviewers and panel members from a cognate discipline? To a referee not from your precise area? Take advice. Get others to read it. Take their impressions and even their misunderstandings seriously.

Or you could write an application with little consideration for impact, with little concern for clarity of expression or the likely audience, and then if you’re unsuccessful, you can console yourself with the thought that it’s the system, not you, that’s at fault.

Estimating Investigator and Researcher Time on a Project

Prompted in part by an interesting discussion of the importance of the budget in establishing the overall credibility and shape of a research proposal at the ever-excellent Research Whisperer, I thought I’d put fingers-to-keyboard on the vexed issue of estimating staff time on research grant applications. Partly this is to share some of what I do and what I recommend, but mostly it’s to ask others how they approach it. Comments, thoughts, suggestions, and experiences welcome as ever in the comments below.

Estimating staff time is by some distance the hardest part of the budget, and often when I discuss this with academic colleagues, we end up in a kind of “I dunno, what do you reckon?” impasse. (I should say that it’s me who speaks like that, not them). I’ve never been involved in a research project (other than my ‘desk research’ MPhil), so I’ve really no idea, and I don’t have any particular insight into how long certain tasks will take. Career young academics, and the increasing number of academics who have never had the opportunity to lead on a research project, have little experience to draw upon, and even those who have experience seem to find it difficult. I can understand that, because I’d find it difficult too. If someone where to ask me how estimate how much time I spent over the course of a year on (say) duties related to my role as School Research Ethics Officer, I’d struggle to give them in answer in terms of a percentage FTE or in terms of a total number of working days.

It’s further complicated by the convenient fiction that academic staff work the standard five day weeks, and 37.5 hour working weeks. Even those who don’t regularly work evenings and weekends will almost certainly have flexible working patterns that make it even harder to estimate how long something will take. This means that the standard units of staff time that are most often used – total days and percentage of full time – aren’t straightforwardly convertible from one currency to the other. To make matters worse, some European funding sources seem to prefer ‘person months’. Rather than the standard working week, I think this probably reflects the reality of academic work in many institutions:

The response to my question about how much time the project will take is often answered with another question. What will the funder pay for? What looks right? What feels right? Longer, thinner project, or shorter and more intensive? The answer is always and inevitably, ‘it depends’. It depends upon what is right for the project. A longer less intensive project might make sense if you have to wait for survey responses to come in, or for other things to happen. On the other hand, if it’s something that you can and want to work on intensively, go for it. But the project has to come first. What would it take to properly take on this research challenge?

Often the answer is a bit hand-wavy and guesstimate-ish. Oh, I don’t know….say… about, two days per week? Two and a half? Would they fund three? This is a generally a good starting point. What’s not a good starting point is the kind of fifteen-minutes-every-Tuesday approach, where you end up with a ‘salami project’ – a few people involved, but sliced so thinly it’s hard to see how anything will get done. This just isn’t credible, and it’s very unlikely to get funded by the likes of the ESRC (and other funders too, I’m sure) if they don’t believe that you’ll possibly be able to deliver for the amount of money (time) you’re asking for. Either they’ll conclude that you don’t understand what your own research requires (which is fatal for any chance of funding), or they’ll think that you’re trying to pull a fast one in terms of the value for money criterion. And they won’t like that much either.

The other way to make sure that you’re not going to get funded is to go the other way and become greedy. I’ve noticed that – oddly – academics seldom over-estimate their own time, but over-estimate the amount of researcher time required. I’ve seen potential bids before now that include a heavy smattering of research associates, but no clear idea what it actually is they’ll be doing all day, other than doing stuff that the lead investigator doesn’t want to do. In a UK context, overheads are calculated on the basis of investigator and researcher time, so including researchers is doubly expensive. One way round this that I often recommend is to ensure that what’s required is actually a research associate (who attracts overheads) rather than an academic-related project manager or administrator (who doesn’t). But if it’s hard to estimate how long it will take you to do any given task, it’s doubly hard to estimate how long it will take someone else – usually someone less experienced and less skilled – and perhaps from a cognate sub-discipline rather than from your own.

My usual advice is for would-be principal investigators to draw up a table showing the various phases of the project as rows, and project staff as columns. In addition to the main phases of the research, extra rows should be added for the various stages of dissemination and impact activity; for project coordination with colleagues; for line management of any researchers or administrative/managerial staff; for professional development where appropriate. Don’t forget travelling time associated with meetings, fieldwork, conferences etc. The main thing that I usually see underestimated is project management time. As principal investigator, you will have to meet reasonably regularly with your finance people, and you’ll have to manage and direct the project research associates. Far too many academics seem to see RAs as clones who will instinctively know what to do and don’t need much in the way of direction, advice, or feedback.

Once this is done, I suggest adding up the columns and then working backwards from those total numbers of project days to a percentage FTE, or days per week, or whatever alternative metric you prefer. In the UK, the research councils assuming that 220 days = 1 working year, so you can use this to calculate the percentage of full time. The number that you come out with should feel intuitively about right. If it doesn’t, then something has probably gone wrong. Go back to the table, and adjust things a little. By going to and fro, from the precision of the table to the intuition of the percentage of time, you should reach what my philosophical hero and subject of my thesis, John Rawls, called ‘reflective equilibrium’. Though he wasn’t talking about investigator time. Once you’re happy with the result, you should probably use the figure from the table, and you should certainly consider putting the table in full in the ‘justification for resources’ section.

Something I’m starting at the moment as part of the end-of-project review process is to go back to the original estimates of staff time, and to get a sense from the research team about how accurate they were, and what they would estimate differently next time, if anything. The two things that have come out strongly from this so far I’ve outlined above – managing staff and project administration – but I’ll be looking for others.

So…. over to you. How do you estimate researcher and investigator time? Have you been involved in a funded project? If so, what did you miss in your forecasts (if anything)? What would you do differently next time?