Category: Funding

Six writing habits I reckon you ought to avoid in grant applications…..

There are lots of mistakes to avoid in writing grant applications, and I’ve written a bit about some of them in some previous posts (see “advice on grant applications” link above).  This one is more about writing habits.  I read a lot of draft grant applications, and as a result I’ve got an increasingly long list of writing quirks, ticks, habits, styles and affectations that Get On My Nerves.

Imagine I’m a reviewer… Okay, I’ll start again.. imagine I’m a proper reviewer with some kind of power and influence…. imagine further that I’ve got a pile of applications to review that’s as high as a high pile of applications.  Imagine how well disposed I’d feel towards anyone who makes reading their writing easier, clearer, or in the least bit more pleasant.  Remember how the really well-written essays make your own personal marking hell a little bit less sulphurous for a short time.  That.  Whatever that tiny burst of goodwill – or antibadwill – is worth, you want it.

The passive voice is excessively used

I didn’t know the difference between active and passive voice until relatively recently, and if you’re also from a generation where grammar wasn’t really teached in schools then you might not either.  Google is your friend for a proper explanation by people who actually know what they’re talking about, and you should probably read that first, but my favourite explanation is from Rebecca Johnson – if you can add “by zombies”, then it’s passive voice. I’ve also got the beginnings of a theory that the Borg from Star Trek use the passive voice, and that’s one of the things that makes them creepy (“resistance is futile” and “you will be assimilated”)  but I don’t know enough about grammar or Star Trek to make a case for this.   Sometimes the use of the passive voice (by zombies) is appropriate, but often it makes for distant and slightly tepid writing.  Consider:

A one day workshop will be held (by zombies) at which the research findings will be disseminated (by zombies).  A recording of the event will be made (bz) and posted on our blog (bz).  Relevant professional bodies will be approached (bz)…

This will be done, that will be done.  Yawn.  Although, to be fair, a workshop with that many zombies probably won’t be a tepid affair.  But much better, I think, to take ownership… we will do these things, co-Is A and B will lead on X.  Academic writing seems to encourage depersonalisation and formality and distancing (which is why politicians love it – “mistakes were made [perhaps by zombies, but not by me]”.

I think there are three reasons why I don’t like it.  One is that it’s just dull.  A second is that I think it can read like a way of avoiding detail or specifics or responsibility for precisely the reasons that politicians use it, so it can subconsciously undermine the credibility of what’s being proposed.  The third reason is that I think for at least some kinds of projects, who the research team are – and in particular who the PI is – really matters.  I can understand the temptation to be distant and objective and sciency as if the research speaks entirely for itself.  But this is your grant application, it’s something that you ought to be excited and enthused by, and that should come across. If you’re not, don’t even bother applying.

First Person singular, First Person plural, Third Person

Pat Thomson’s blog Patter has a much fuller and better discussion about the use of  “we” and “I” in academic writing that I can’t really add much to. But I think the key thing is to be consistent – don’t be calling yourself Dr Referstoherselfinthethirdperson in one part of the application, “I” in another, “the applicant” somewhere else, and “your humble servant”/ “our man in Havana” elsewhere.  Whatever you choose will feel awkward, but choose a consistent method of awkwardness and have done with it. Oh, and don’t use “we” if you’re the sole applicant.  Unless you’re Windsor (ii), E.

And don’t use first names for female team members and surnames for male team members.  Or, worse, first names for women, titles and surnames for men. I’ve not seen this myself, but I read about it in a tweet with the hashtag #everydaysexism

Furthermore and Moreover…

Is anyone willing to mount a defence for the utility of either of these words, other than (1) general diversity of language and (2) padding out undergraduate essays to the required word count? I’m just not sure what either of these words actually means or adds, other than perhaps as an attempted rhetorical flourish, or, more likely, a way of bridging non-sequiturs or propping up poor structuring.

“However” and “Yet”…. I’ll grudgingly allow to live.  For now.

Massive (Right Justified) Wall-o-Text Few things make my heart sink more than having to read a draft application that regards the use of paragraphs and other formatting devices as illustrative of a lack of seriousness and rigour. There is a distinction between densely argued and just dense.  Please make it easier to read… and that means not using right hand justification.  Yes, it has a kind of superficial neatness, but it makes the text much less readable.

Superabundance of Polysyllabic  Terminology

Too many long words. It’s not academic language and (entirely necessary) technical terms and jargon that I particularly object to – apart from in the lay summary, of course.  It’s a general inflation of linguistic complexity – using a dozen words where one will do, never using a simple word where a complex one will do, never making your point twice when a rhetorically-pleasing triple is on offer.

I guess this is all done in an attempt to make the application or the text seem as scholarly and intellectually rigorous as possible, and I think students may make similar mistakes.  As an undergraduate I think I went through a deeply regrettable phase of trying to ape the style of academic papers in my essay writing, and probably made myself sound like one of the most pompous nineteen year olds on the planet.

If you find yourself using words like “effectuate”, you might want to think about whether you might be guilty of this.

Sta. Cca. To. Sen. Ten. Ces.

Varying and manipulating sentence length can be done deliberately to produce certain effects.  Language has a natural rhythm and pace.  Most people probably have some awareness of what that is.  They are aware that sentences which are one paced can be very dull.  They are aware that this is something tepid about this paragraph.  But not everyone can feel the music in language.  I think it is a lack of commas that is killing this paragraph.  Probably there is a technical term for this.

So… anyone willing to defend “moreover” or “furthermore”? Any particularly irritating habits I’ve missed?  Anyone actually know any grammar or linguistics provide any technical terms for any of these habits?

ESRC success rates by discipline for 2012-13

Update: 2013/14 figures here.

WA pot of gold at the end of a rainbowith all of the fanfare of a cat-burglar slipping in through a first floor window in back office of a diamond museum, the ESRC has published its Vital Statistics for 2012-13, including the success rates by academic discipline.  I’ve been looking forward to seeing these figures to see if there’s been any change since last year’s figures, which showed huge variations in success rates between different disciplines, with success rates varying from 1 in 68 for Business and Management and 2 in 62 for Education compared to 7 of 18 for socio-legal studies.

The headline news, as trumpeted in the Times Higher, is that success rates are indeed up, and that “demand management” appears to be working.  Their table shows how applications, amount of money distributed, and success rates have varied over the last few years, and has figures for all of the research councils.  For the ESRC, the numbers in their Vital Statistics document are slightly different (315 applications, 27% success rate) to those in the Times Higher table (310, 26%) , possibly because some non-university recipients have been excluded.  The overall picture is hugely encouraging and is a great improvement on 14% success rates last year.  And it’s also worth repeating that these figures don’t seem to include the Knowledge Exchange scheme, which now has a 52% success rate.  This success rate is apparently too high, as the scheme is going to end in March next year to be replaced with a scheme of passing funding directly to institutions based on their ESRC funding record – similar to the EPSRC scheme which also delegates responsibility for running impact/knowledge exchange schemes to universities.

For the ESRC, “demand management” measures so far have largely consisted of:
(i) Telling universities to stop submitting crap applications (I paraphrase, obviously…..)
(ii) Telling universities that they have to have some kind of internal peer review process
(iii) Threatening some kind of researcher sanctions if (i) and (ii) don’t do the trick.

And the message appears to have been getting through.  Though I do wonder how much of this gain is through eliminating “small” research grants – up to £100k – which I think in recent times had a worse success rate than Standard Grants, though that wasn’t always the case historically.  Although it’s more work to process and review applications for four pots of 100k than for one of 400k, the loss of Standard Grants is to be regretted, as it’s now very difficult indeed to get funding for social science projects with a natural size of £20k-£199k.

But what you’re probably wondering is how your academic discipline got on this time round.  Well, you can find this year’s and last year’s Vital Statistics documents hidden away in a part of the ESRC’s website that even I struggle to find, and I’ve collated them for easy comparison purposes here.  But the figures aren’t comparing like with like – the 2011/12 figures included the last six months of the old Small Grants Scheme, which distorts things.  It’s also difficult (obviously) to make judgements based on small numbers which probably aren’t statistically significant. Also, in the 2011-12 figures there were 43 applications (about 6% of the total) which were flagged as “no lead discipline”, which isn’t a category this year.  But some overall trends have emerged:

  • Socio-legal Studies (7 from 18, 3 from 8), Linguistics (6 from 27, 5 from 15) and Social Anthropology (5 from 18, 4 from 5) have done significantly better than the average for the last two years
  • Business and Management (1 from 68, 2 from 17) and Education (2 from 62, 2 from 19) continue to do very poorly.
  • Economics and Economics and Social History did very well the year before last, but much less well this year.
  • Psychology got one-third of all the successes last year, and over a quarter the year before, though the success rate is only very slightly above average in both years.
  • No projects in the last two years funded from Environmental Planning or Science and Technology Studies
  • Demography (2 from 2) and Social Work (3 from 6) have their first projects funded since 2009/10.

Last year I speculated briefly about what the causes of these differences might be and looked at success rates in previous years, and much of that is still relevant.  Although we should welcome the overall rise in success rates, it’s still the case that some academic subjects do consistently better than others with the ESRC.  While we shouldn’t expect to see exactly even success rates, when some consistently outperform the average, and some under-perform, we ought to wonder why that is.

Meanwhile, over at the ESRC…

There have been a few noteworthy developments at the ESRC over the summer months which I think are probably worth drawing together into a single blog post for those (like me) who’ve made the tactical error of choosing to have some time off over the summer.

1.  The annual report. 

I’ve been looking forward to this (I know, I know….) to see whether there’s been any substantial change to the huge differences in success rates between different academic disciplines.  I wrote a post about this back in October and it’s by some distance the most read article on my blog. Has there been any improvements since 2011/12, when Business and Management had 1 of 68 applications funded and Education 2 of 62, compared to Socio-Legal Studies (39%, 7 of 18), and Social Anthropology (28%, 5 from 18).

Sadly, we still don’t know, because this information is nowhere to be found in the annual report. We know the expenditure by region and the top 11 (sic) recipients of research expenditure, research and training expenditure, and the two combined.  But we don’t know how this breaks down by subject.  To be fair, that information wasn’t published until October last year, and so presumably it will be forthcoming.  And presumably the picture will be better this year.

That’s not to say that there’s no useful information in the annual report. We learn that the ESRC Knowledge Exchange Scheme has a very healthy success rate of 52%, though I think I’m right in saying that the scheme will have been through a number of variations in the period in question. Historically it’s not been an easy scheme to apply for, partly because of the need for co-funding from research partners, and partly because of a number of very grey areas around costing rules.

For the main Research Grants Scheme success rates are also up, though by how much is unclear.  The text of the report (p. 18) states that

After a period where rates plummeted to as low as 11 per cent, they have now risen to 35 per cent, in part because we have committed additional funding to the scheme [presumably through reallocation, rather than new money] but also because application volume has decreased. This shows the effects of our demand management strategy, with HEIs now systematically quality assuring their applications and filtering out those which are not ready for submission. We would encourage HEIs to continue to develop their demand management strategies as this means academics and administrators in both HEIs and the ESRC have been able to focus efforts on processing and peer-reviewing a smaller number of good quality applications, rather than spending time on poor quality proposals which have no chance of being funded.

Oddly the accompanying table gives a 27% success rate, and unfortunately (at the time of writing) the document with success rates for individual panel meetings hasn’t been updated since April 2012, and the individual panel meeting documents only list funded projects, not success rates. But whatever the success rate is, it does appear to be a sign that “demand management” is working and that institutions are practising restraint in their application habits.  Success rates of between a quarter and a third sound about right to me – enough applications to allow choice, but not so many as to be a criminal waste of time and effort.

The report also contains statistics about the attendance of members at Council and Audit Committee Meetings, but you’ll have to look them up for yourself as I have a strict “no spoilers” policy on this blog.

I very much look forward – and I think the research community is too – to seeing the success rates by academic discipline at a later date.

2. A new Urgency Grants Mechanism

More good news…. a means by which research funding decisions can be taken quickly in response to the unexpected and significant.  The example given is the Riots of summer 2011, and I remember thinking that someone would get a grant out of all this as I watched TV pictures my former stomping ground of Croydon burn.  But presumably less… explosive unexpected opportunities might arise too.  All this seems only sensible, and allows a way for urgent requests to be considered in a timely and transparent manner.

3. ESRC Future Research Leaders call

But “sensible” isn’t a word I’d apply to the timing of this latest call.  First you’ve heard of it?  Well, better get your skates on because the deadline is the 24th September. Outline applications?  Expressions of interest?  Nope, a full application.  And in all likelihood, you should probably take your skates off again because chances are that your institution’s internal deadlines for internal peer review have already been and gone.

The call came out on or about the 23rd July, with a deadline of 24th September. Notwithstanding what I’ve said previously about no time of the academic year being a good time to get anything done, it’s very hard to understand why this happened.  Surely the ESRC know that August/September is when a lot of academic staff (and therefore research support) are away from the university on a mixture of annual leave and undertaking research.  Somehow, institutions are expected to cobble together a process of internal review and institutional support, and individuals are expected to find time to write the application.  It’s hard enough for the academics to write the applications, but if we take the demand management agenda seriously, we should be looking at both the track record and the proposed project of potential applicants, thinking seriously about mentoring and support, and having difficult conversations with people we don’t think are ready.  That needs a lot of senior time, and a lot of research management time.

This scheme is a substantial investment.  Effectively 70 projects worth up to £250k (at 80% fEC).  This is a major investment, and given that the Small Grants scheme and British Academy Fellowship success rates are tiny, this is really the major opportunity to be PI on a substantial project.  This scheme is overtly picking research leaders of the future, but the timetable means that it’s picking those leaders from those who didn’t have holiday booked in the wrong couple of weeks, or who could clear their diaries to write the application, or who don’t have a ton of teaching to prepare for – which is most early career academics, I would imagine.

Now it might be objected that we should have know that the call was coming.  Well…. yes and no. The timing was similar last year, and it was tight then, but it’s worse this year – it was announced on about the same date, but with a deadline 4th October, almost two working weeks later.  Two working weeks that turns it from a tall order into something nigh on impossible, and which can only favour those with lighter workloads in the run-up to the new academic year. And even knowing that it’s probably coming doesn’t help.  Do we really expect people to start making holiday plans around when a particular call might come out?  Really?  If we must have a September deadline, can we know about it in January?  Or even earlier?  To be fair, the ESRC has got much better with pre-call announcements of late, at least for very narrow schemes, but this really isn’t good enough.

I also have a recollection (backed up by a quick search through old emails, but not by documentary evidence) that last year the ESRC were talking about changing the scheme for this year, possibly with multiple deadlines or even going open call.  Surely, I remember thinking, this start-of-year madness can only be a one-off.

Apparently not.

Is there a danger that research funding calls are getting too narrow?

The ESRC have recently added a little more detail to a previous announcement about a pending call for European-Chinese joint research projects on Green Economy and Population Change.  Specifically, they’re after projects which address the following themes:

Green Economy

  • The ‘greenness and dynamics of economies’
  • Institutions, Policies and planning for a green economy
  • The green economy in cities and metropolitan areas
  • Consumer behaviour and lifestyles in a green economy

Understanding population Change

  • changing life course
  • urbanisation and migration
  • labour markets and social security dynamics
  • methodology, modelling and forecasting
  • care provision
  • comparative policy learning

Projects will need to involve institutions from at least two of the participating European counties (UK, France (involvement TBC), Germany, Netherlands) and two institutions in China. On top of this is an expectation that there will be sustainability/capacity building around the research collaborations, plus the usual further plus points of involving stakeholders and interdisciplinary research.

Before I start being negative, or potentially negative, I have one blatant plug and some positive things to say. The blatant plug is that the University of Nottingham has a campus in Ningbo in China which is eligible for NSFC funding and therefore would presumably count as one Chinese partner. I wouldn’t claim to know all about all aspects of our Ningbo research expertise, but I know people who do.  Please feel free to contact me with ideas/research agendas and I’ll see if I can put you in touch with people who know people.

The positive things.  The topics seem to me to be important, and we’ve been given advance notice of the call and a fair amount of time to put something together.  There’s a reference to Open Research Area procedures and mechanisms, which refers to agreements between the UK, France, Netherlands and Germany on a common decision making process for joint projects in which each partner is funded by their national funder under their own national funding rules.  This is excellent, as it doesn’t require anyone to become an expert in another country’s national funder’s rules, and doesn’t have the double or treble jeopardy problem of previous calls where decisions were taken by individual funders.  It’s also good that national funders are working together on common challenges – this adds fresh insight, invites interesting comparative work and pools intellectual and financial resources.

However, what concerns me about calls like this is that the area at the centre of the particular Venn diagram of this call is really quite small.  It’s open to researchers with research interests in the right areas, with collaborators in the right European countries, with collaborators in China.   That’s two – arguably three – circles in the diagram.  Of course, there’s a fourth – proposals that are outstanding.  Will there be enough strong competition on the hallowed ground at the centre of all these circles? It’s hard to say, as we don’t know yet how much money is available.

I’m all for calls that encourage, incentivise, and facilitate international research.  I’m in favour of calls on specific topics which are under-researched, which are judged of particular national or international importance, or where co-funding from partners can be found to address areas of common interest.

But I’m less sure about having both in one call – both very specific requirements in terms of the nationality of the partner institutions, and in terms of the call themes. Probably the scope of this call is wide enough – presumably the funders think so – but I can’t help think that that less onerous eligibility requirements in terms of partners could lead to greater numbers of high quality applications.

Demand mismanagement: a practical guide

I’ve written an article on Demand (Mis)management for Research Professional. While most of the site’s content is behind a paywall, they’ve been kind enough to make my article open access.  Which saves me the trouble of cutting and pasting it here.

Universities are striving to make their grant applications as high in quality as possible, avoid wasting time and energy, and run a supportive yet critical internal review process. Here are a few tips on how not to do it. [read the full article]

In other news, I was at the ARMA conference earlier this week and co-presented a session on Research Development for the Special Interest Group with Dr Jon Hunt from the University of Bath.  A copy of the presentation and some further thoughts will follow once I’ve caught up with my email backlog….