Kerstin Fritsches is a former research fellow who spent the majority of her 12-year research career on soft money at the University of Queensland, Australia.

She learned more than she would like about the challenges facing early career researchers (ECRs). While her research focused on what fish and other marine animals can see (taking her to some wonderful locations), she has been passionate about improving the situation for ECRs, and involved in postdoc policy and career development training for many years.

An apparently universal need for accessible and effective career development training motivated Kerstin to leave academia and found PostdocTraining to offer career development training tailored specifically to postdocs and their institutions.

Winning a fellowship is a bit of a holy grail for early career researchers.

When these positions mean an independent salary, often accompanied by funding for research support, it’s no surprise that they are hotly contested and bring well deserved prestige.

Parliament (Photo by Tseen Khoo)

Fellowships show you can win funding based on your track record and excel against stiff competition.  They can also end up being the key to long-term careers in academia, increasing your chances of continuing on a full-time research path.

Given their potential benefits, it’s worth looking more closely at how to go about securing a fellowship.

Each funding scheme has its own rules and traditions, so the 10 steps outlined here are general observations based on what I –  and my peers – wish we’d known when we started applying. Hopefully, they’re practical ideas for your own game plan.

1. Start planning early. Begin preparing at least a couple of years in advance. This doesn’t mean actually writing proposals, but you want to take the steps outlined here long before you start your application.

2. Research and shortlist funding agencies that provide the kind of fellowships you’re after. Most agencies periodically change their fellowship rules, or budget cuts may affect a key fellowship scheme relevant to your field and situation. You need to be aware of changes and have a Plan B and C in mind. Are there other funding agencies supporting your kind of research that offer fellowships? How about fellowships given by your country of origin (if you currently work overseas), philanthropic foundations, specific universities, or not-for-profit agencies?

3. Look at the funding rules early. Are you actually eligible to apply? For example, do you hold the right visa and are you within the allowed timeframe since completing your PhD? You don’t want to realise that your options are more limited than you thought when it’s too late, or inadvertently miss an eligibility deadline.

4. Pick out and attend relevant information sessions. Most institutions run information sessions every year for major funding schemes. These sessions are often excellent sources of tips on reading between the lines of the formal funding rules and application questions, and for getting the ‘insider’s view’ from people on selection panels.

5. Talk to those ‘in the know’. Ask recent winners of previous award rounds about their applications – what their track record looked like, how many times they tried before being successful, and so on. Make sure you ask several people so you get a good overview of what you need to achieve to be competitive and what’s likely to determine success. Attending information sessions will have given you a good sense of who in your institution are the experts at navigating the processes of particular funding agencies, and you can direct your specific questions to them.

6. Aim to fill in all the ‘line items’ in the application. The application form will tell you what kind of track record items are valued. While publications are obviously the main yardstick, don’t ignore opportunities to offer other evidence of impact such as conference presentations or reviewer duties. Familiarise yourself with the types of evidence usually sought, and aim to collect evidence for all the key items, to present yourself as exactly the well-rounded future research leader they are looking for.

7. Independence vs. support. When planning your application, think carefully to what extent you want to align yourself with a senior advisor as part of the fellowship. While there’s often the temptation to be as independent as possible, starting your own lab from scratch, for example, can waste a lot of valuable research time. Would you be better off conducting your fellowship under the wing of an established lab head with all the research infrastructure in place? Or do you have enough managerial and administrative experience to start your own lab quickly and not eat up the first six months of your hard-won fellowship?

8. Are you ready? Ask yourself – and others, if you can – honestly: “Am I competitive enough now to apply in the coming fellowship round?”  If the consensus is that you are not likely to succeed this time, you might feel time spent working on your track record would be more productive for now than putting an application together. You may get conflicting advice on whether or not to apply. Some issues to consider in this event are:

• Does your institution expect you to apply to be eligible for other support, or to show that you are serious about your career? If this is the case, rather than plough ahead, start talking about your career plans to senior academics in charge and seek their advice. You may be able to agree that an application is premature now but that you should receive coaching to get you ready for next year.
• Are there limitations to the number of times you can apply for a particular fellowship? If so, be careful not to waste chances by applying when your track record is not yet up to scratch.
• Are you encouraged to apply ‘for practice’s sake’? Consider instead whether it would be worth practising your grant writing skills on a smaller funding scheme with a higher success rate (see also point 10).

9. Find mentors. If you have gone through Steps 5 and 8, you will already have discussed your potential fellowship application with a range of people whom you could ask to mentor you through the application process. Make sure you ask for help and some experienced eyes to look over your application.

10. Try early and often. Like any skill, writing successful grant applications develops through practice. Ideally, you don’t want your first application to be the all-important fellowship application that could make or break your career. Start early with smaller funding applications such as conference travel grants, funding for equipment, or small project grants held in your name. Success with these boosts your track record and provides valuable ‘social proof’ to funding agencies that you are worth backing.

In summary, a fellowship application starts long before you start filling out the form. It means targeted preparation, practice and coaching – things many postdocs don’t tend to plan for.

Success rates are often no greater than 10%-20%, but following a clear plan will put you well ahead of the pack. Good hunting!

Short Cut Road (Photo by Nic McPhee – http://www.flickr.com/photos/nicmcphee/)

Busy-ness is something of a badge of honour in academia, but I am genuinely busy right now.

I fly 500kms to work and back each week, hold down a fairly demanding job, and want to spend some time with my family. When I am busy, ‘good practice’ goes out the window. At home, this means I stop planning dinners, cleaning behind the toilet, or pairing my socks. At work, I stop filing my references, tagging entries in my database, or cleaning out my inbox.

Chaos reigns but, curiously, things still get done. I’m a productive person who is deeply lazy, so I’m open to any and all hacks that make my life easier. This is a small selection of my quick and dirty research tricks. These tricks save me time and, if I can be honest with you, I use them even when I’m not very busy. I share some of these with you in hope that you will share some of your own in the comments.

1. Delegate to a librarian

Librarians are good at helping you to design a search strategy and refine keywords, but they are also usually helpful souls who go that extra step without being asked. I must have a pathetic tone of voice or something because, after a phone call, it’s common for one of these dear people to send me a comprehensive list of databases, suggested search strings, and even a few references with  which to get started. I feel vaguely guilty whenever this happens, but those lists are like GOLD, my friends. Do librarians come straight from heaven? I think they must.

2. Let Google format references and find page numbers

Google Scholar formatting citations for you

I’m not a complete slob when it comes to managing my references but, since I co-author most papers, the ‘cite while you write’ function uses up more time than it saves. I’m constantly moving between Scrivener and Word, throwing the paper to my co-authors on email, and so on. I’ve learned from experience that bundling and unbundling the references is just more trouble than it is worth.

So, whenever I talk about another author in my paper, I put their name and the date in brackets. Later, I do a quick search in Google Scholar, locate the reference and go straight to those blue text options underneath. At the end there is one labelled “more”, click on it, and an option will pop up called ‘cite’. Click on that and the citation will appear, fully formed in APA style, in a pop-up window (see the image on the left). Cut and paste the reference text straight into your paper – you can always reformat it to another style later. Likewise, if you’ve been too sloppy to note page numbers of quotes from books, cut and paste the text into Google Books to find the page it appears on.

Bless you, Google, you are truly the researcher’s friend.

A caveat: this trick does not work for thesis writers. That way lies madness. Use a reference manager!

3. Ask Twitter

Twitter solves almost all my professional problems. A politely worded query with a ‘Pls RT’ at the end will travel around the globe in no time flat. Someone, somewhere, will turn out to be an expert on the topic you are interested in and, if you are lucky, they will send you their whole library of references (this has happened for me – more than once).

There are ‘channels’ on Twitter where you are sure to find researchers hanging out, eager for a bit of productive procrastination, who might turn their considerable brain power to solving your problem.  If you haven’t yet discovered the treasure trove / brains trust that is #phdchat or #ecrchat, you are seriously missing out.

4. Read only what you must read

I feel a bit ashamed to admit this, but when it comes to studies which use statistics, I almost never read the whole paper. I’ll read the abstract for the method and key points, skip straight to the results section for the goodies, then go to the conclusion to see if there’s anything I missed. Once I decide the paper is worth the effort, I go back and read more deeply. With edited books I always, always read the introduction diligently and look through the index to decide which chapters are worth my time.

I electronically search articles for terms like “found”, “conclude” or “argue” to see if I can get directly at the meat without having to read the vegetables. I’m not averse to papers that are difficult conceptually, just those which are poorly written. I won’t stick with a paper long if it’s just too much hard work. I scan-read most of the time, using a ruler or my finger to ‘drag’ my eyes down the pages faster.

I sometimes feel guilty that I am not indulging in leisurely, deep reading all that often… You won’t tell anyone, will you?

5. Cut corners on the background stuff

Look, any researcher who claims they never use Wikipedia is lying. Wikipedia is a great starting point when you are researching background information, by which I mean information that helps you understand concepts and theories that you encounter in other people’s work. In fact, I think we should stop being snobby about Wikipedia and dedicate some more of our collective scholarly energies into improving it. I heard of an undergraduate teacher who, instead of setting essays, set their students to clean up and add to Wikipedia entries – a great idea, but I digress.

Other ‘basic’ resources are helpful, too. I find books written for undergraduates on famous theorists or philosophers are surprisingly helpful because they cut through the crap don’t waste time building sophisticated arguments; they just tell you what the thinker was on about. Likewise, books on writing and analysing data aimed at undergraduates are easier starting points before you tackle the ‘grown up’ texts. If you are embarrassed to be seen with them on your desk, scan relevant pages at the library shelf using an app like ‘camscanner’ and send them straight to your Evernote database.

Children are taught how to learn stuff in online environments these days and often make better use of them than us grown ups. You can probably learn stuff by watching your children, or nieces and nephews, do their homework.

Thesiswhisperer Jnr, like many young men, is a fanatical Minecraft player and will spend hours watching ‘walk through’ videos. I’ve adopted his habits and now routinely use YouTube as part of my information foraging. It’s great for technical stuff like formatting things in Word but I’ve recently discovered that there are many great ‘walk throughs’ on all sorts of subjects. The Khan academy does great work explaining science in bite-sized chunks. In the humanities, there are lectures by key theorists and even short features on key thinkers and concepts. For some reason, a YouTube video is like a knowledge injection for me: the facts go in quick and deep without the long digestion period I need to get information from text.

So, that’s a few quick and dirty tips from me – what about you? Have a tip or two to share? Love to hear them in the comments!

Related posts on the Thesis Whisperer:

• 5 more phone apps for researchers
• Are you a piler or a filer?

Water Dragon (Photo by Jonathan O’Donnell)

As I was digesting information about the funding cuts a few weeks ago, I read Kate Bowles’ considered piece on the folly of applying an “efficiency dividend” to higher education.

At the time, I wanted to blog more specifically on the idea of applying such a mechanistic and corrosive idea as an “efficiency dividend” to research institutions and the effect it would have on research cultures.

When I sat down to type it up, I realised that it would be a long, tedious rant that no-one would want to read.

What I thought might be more useful is a post focused on myths about research cultures, and letting these cultures’ specific, complex forms speak for themselves.

Universities and institutes scrambling for pieces of the (often shrinking) grant pie is a narrative as old as time. OK, maybe not quite that old, but certainly old enough to scar the past few generations of academics and researchers. There’s the constant hope for a slice of the grant pie; sometimes, we make do with crumbs and, at other times, we go hungry.

As the pressures of chasing the funding dragon bite deeper into research organisations, many in senior roles talk ever more loudly about building research capacity and structuring researcher development. These strategies are meant to result in better and more research wins (and outputs), and institutional hopes of establishing a research workforce that’s upwardly mobile for excellence metrics (e.g. Excellence in Research for Australia) or other metrics that might come out of the oven.

Before I spend too much time mixing metaphors about dragons, pies, and baking, here are five myths about research cultures I want to debunk:

1. Tell your academics that’s what’s needed.

Just because a university decides that it’s time to get serious about research, and exhorts the academic workforce to focus and produce, doesn’t make it happen. Wanting it does not make it so. A multi-level bureaucracy like a university needs a clear strategy for growing research, but it won’t happen without the right investment of expertise, funding, and overall priority. You cannot get more or better research from staff who are already 100% committed with teaching and administration loads.

That said, what usually comes hand in hand with telling your academics that research must be ramped up, is the university deciding…

2. To throw money at it.

While having money thrown at research is better than not having money thrown at it, more money in and of itself doesn’t mean much. It definitely doesn’t make much of a difference in the shorter-term.

Building research cultures is all about developing capacity and expertise within a certain group. For example, suddenly offering ten scholarships in field X doesn’t create research culture in that field unless you already have good supervisors, research projects, and publications.

Getting to this stage takes time, healthy institutional morale, and staff goodwill. You can’t buy these things, but institutions do try. In particular, they love…

3. Importing research stars.

As the UK’s Research Excellence Framework (REF), Australia’s Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA), and other ‘research excellence’ exercises demonstrate, one of the sure-fire ways to boost a department’s profile is to bring in those with stellar research track-records. I have no problems with this as an occasional tactic, but the effect of researcher-raiding as a systemic exercise is quite another animal. As I see it, building research cultures – as opposed to buying in researcher CVs – depends on how much a researcher brings to a role besides their publications. Are they good mentors? Do they work well with teams and encourage early career researcher (ECR) development? What do their PhD students think of them?

There are researchers who are excellent at landing and completing big grants; if this is all they do well, is this enough?

4. Bring in the lions.

I’m a big fan of transparency, but many departments and faculties use ‘transparency’ as the reason why they might want to showcase researcher performance. It’s fine to create a collegial feeling of mutual momentum and achievement, and to be able to see where the strengths are in one’s unit. But when this kind of ‘transparency’ is used as a tool for shaming those who are seen to be underperforming, it can be counterproductive to building a research culture. Workload transparency? Yes. Researcher output? A bit more problematic.

5. It’s better to weed before you feed.

The worst thing you can do is to start sidelining staff as research inactive (or without research potential) before you’ve offered them support for their research and research funding plans. Have they been given a chance to perform – really? See point #1 about having appropriate infrastructure in place to let researchers grow and breathe; there is limited gain and much resentment to be fostered by applying research pressures to staff who have no room to negotiate research time.

What I hope this post demonstrates, besides my capacity for occasional hyperbole, is that research cultures are complex and easily skewed. It helps to think of them as ecosystems or tapestries – you can’t mess with one part of it without affecting the whole. This is why depleting (or “slowing the increase” for) university funding has significant, long-term consequences.

In practice, this means looking at all of those legal and policy issues which have an impact on data sharing and use, such as copyright, licensing, ethics, Gov 2.0, etc and keeping an eye on developments overseas.

ANDS is building the Australian Research Data Commons: a cohesive collection of research resources from all research institutions, to make better use of Australia’s research data outputs.

Tattoos are big business at the moment.  People everywhere are adorning themselves with something to help make them feel a little more individual, something which belongs to them and no-one else.

Remapped back, from Kyle McDonald on Flickr

The data you create as part of your research can have its own tattoo, too.  It’s called a Digital Object Identifier (DOI). You’re probably familiar with the concept of the DOI being attached to your journal articles. Now you can also attach them to your data. It is something like a tattoo for your body, an electronic tag for your dog, or an ISBN for your book.

You should tattoo your data for the same reasons you tattoo your body (and for some bonus reasons, too):

• It makes the data uniquely identifiable.
• You will always be identified as the creator of the data.
• Having a data tattoo means that your data can always be located with a simple web search.
• It means your data can be cited, whether by someone else or by you and any data citations can be added to journal citations.
• It means that usage of your data can be followed as others use and cite your data.

“So what?” I hear you ask. Well, changes are afoot in the research world, the kinds of changes which may well have an effect on the way reward structures in academe operate.  Currently, merit in the academic world is recognised by virtue of research publications in the form of books or journal articles (or in some cases, creative works).

Other types of research output have barely, if ever, been recognised.  This applies especially to research data, something which is routinely collected in the course of research and that forms the basis of all those publications.  Is it valuable?  Yes, it is, and not just to you.

If your research data is accessible to others, once you have finished with it, other researchers might be able to combine it with their own results, re-analyse it for some purpose you didn’t think of, or use it within some other discipline.

Enter the DOI, the key to ensuring that your data can be cited and its usage tracked, a simple tool which can – and probably will at some point – be used for research evaluation purposes.

Interest has been growing internationally about the whole issue of data citation for a couple of years.  There are now several organisations which provide DOIs solely for data.  The Australian National Data Service (ANDS) mints DOIs in Australia, working as a member of DataCite, a not-for profit organisation formed in 2009 with aims to create easier access to research data and to improve the status of research data as a contribution to the scholarly record.

Most researchers will be familiar with Web of Knowledge (ThomsonReuters, via registration) and Scopus (Elsevier, via registration).  These products currently track journal citations only, but that is about to change.  Both publishers are now investigating the addition of data to their businesses, and ThomsonReuters already has its toes in the water with its new Data Citation Index.  It may take a year or two until it has sufficient content to allow for the production of usage metrics, but they are on their way.

There is a cycle going on here which is well illustrated in the figure below.  The cycle goes something like this.

Building a Culture of Data Citation, by the Australian National Data Service

1. A researcher – let’s call him Ben – creates some data and publishes the findings of the research project in a journal.  At the same time, he makes sure that the data is stored in a publicly accessible data repository, which may be in his university or elsewhere.
2. He (or his friendly data manager) collects a DOI for the data through ANDS. Unlike a real tattoo, this is not painful.
3. He uses this DOI when citing his data, and is pleased to find that other researchers discover and use the data.
4. They, in turn, cite Ben’s data in their future research.
5. Data usage is tracked in Web of Knowledge or Scopus.
6. This information can be used when his research is evaluated and when decisions are made about funding future research.
7. So, he uses his new funding to create additional data and the cycle starts again.

You can already find datasets with DOIs attached.  In the following example, the data record in Research Data Australia includes both the data DOI and a reference to a publication related to it. Find one and you have the other:

• Hanigan, Ivan. (2012 ) Monthly drought data for Australia 1890-2008 using the Hutchinson Drought Index.  Australian Data Archive.  doi: 10.4225/13/50BBFD7E6727A
• Hanigan, IC, Butler, CD, Kokic, PN, Hutchinson, MF. Suicide and Drought in New South Wales, Australia, 1970-2007. Proceedings of the National Academy of Science USA 2012, vol. 109 no. 35 13950-13955, doi: 10.1073/pnas.1112965109

There is lots of discussion around at the moment about how to cite data and, at this stage, no real standard has emerged.  The example above, however, is quite adequate for the purpose of discovering and uniquely identifying the data.  You can find out more by visiting the ANDS website.

So, you can see that there are significant benefits to you in making your research data available to others when you have finished your research.

It’s likely, too, that research funding will be made conditional on data being disseminated following a research project.  Yes, it’s true that not all data can be shared, but most of it can. Get your data tattooed now, and be ahead of the trend!

Dr Meagan Tyler

Meagan has written pieces for The Drum and The Conversation, has been quoted in a variety of publications (including The Age, The Times [UK], and Cosmopolitan), and recently appeared on the TV current affairs program, The Project.

She tweets @DrMeaganTyler.

Academics want their work to be read, and public engagement can be a very useful way to make sure this happens.

There are three main reasons why getting your research out to wider audience can be a good idea:

1. you have expertise to share on a particular issue in the news,
2. you want to get the results of your work out to the public, and
3. you want to raise your profile.

As a researcher, it can be infuriating when you read a piece – in a newspaper or online – that deals with your research area, and it turns out to be misleading or inaccurate. It can be difficult, particularly as an early career researcher, to know how to add your voice and expertise to the debate.

There are several ways you can become more involved, including starting your own blog, getting active on Twitter, putting profile pages up on sites like Academia.edu, and writing opinion pieces. These take time and patience, but they will help raise your profile, thus improving your chances of being quoted in papers, interviewed on radio or TV, or invited to write.

A soap box (Photo by MonsieurLui – http://www.flickr.com/photos/monsieurlui)

All of this means that your research will be more widely read, and the possibility that you might actually influence public debate on a topical issue is much greater.

If there is a particular issue in the news that relates to your work, it’s always helpful to contact your institution’s media unit as a first port of call. In fact, if you have just started in a new position or have recently completed a major piece of work (funded project, PhD etc.), it can be valuable simply to let your media unit know you exist and are able to comment on certain areas. They may be able to direct media queries to you in the future, or help you get opinion pieces published.

Many university media units also offer writing and media engagement workshops to help you figure out what the mainstream media are looking for in an op-ed. These can be a great place to start, and are a helpful reminder that academic writing is often a world away from conveying your point to a broader audience in only 600-800 words.

Writing a piece

Writing an opinion piece is not like writing an academic paper. That may seem obvious, but it can be surprisingly tricky to put that knowledge into practice.

It involves doing things that you’ve probably spent years circling in red-pen as ‘wrong’ in thousands of undergraduate essays. Fun things like: using contractions, starting sentences with conjunctions, and throwing around the odd colloquialism.

Rather embarrassingly, sitting down at the computer to try to write an op-ed for the first time, I found the only reference point I had was Carrie from Sex in the City, sitting in her apartment, writing her latest piece of post-feminist nonsense. This meant I thought sticking lots of questions in (rhetorical or otherwise) made for excellent, and insightful, prose. I’ve since been kindly advised that this is both a common problem, and a bad idea.

In terms of structure, academic and op-ed writing are very different, too. In academic work, we tend to hold off on the big guns until the end, building our overall argument with evidence, then providing a bang to bring it all together in the conclusion. An opinion piece is the reverse; the big guns come first. It is important to draw readers in from the opening sentence.

Engaging online

So, let’s assume all of these steps have gone to plan. You want to engage, your piece is (brilliantly) written, it’s accepted by an editor somewhere, and it’s published in print or online. Congrats, great job!

But it doesn’t end there.

If the piece is online, then odds are there will be a comments section. Almost inevitably, some of the comments will be nasty and some will be personal (‘Are they giving away PhDs with Happy Meals now?’ is one I remember almost fondly now), even on moderated sites. This is especially the case if you are writing on something controversial, that everyone else thinks they are an expert on, or that readers are likely to have strong personal feelings about. I write on porn, the sex industry, and feminism – a veritable hat-trick.

There are two basic schools of thought regarding comments: engage or don’t engage. Some writers believe that it is useful for the author to respond to genuinely interested commenters, and to let other readers know that you are keeping an eye on the comments section. Others take the view that you should not even read the comments, let alone engage, as it is sometimes impossible to tell an interested reader from a troll. Or you just might not fancy reading some of the strange, and occasionally defamatory, things people will say about you.

It ultimately depends on what you are comfortable with and, of course, the context and content of the piece. Sites like The Conversation, for example, are generally well moderated and the editors try to create an environment where authors can connect with readers in a genuine exchange of ideas. But there are other sites (e.g. Online Opinion) where engagement is probably ill-advised unless you have a strong stomach.

If you do want to join in on the comments, but you come across trouble, the most important thing is to keep your cool. Some commenters, particularly on sites where users can maintain their anonymity, just want a fight. The best advice I have ever received for dealing with this problem is to adopt the electronic equivalent of giving someone a smile and wave after they’ve sworn at you; just take a deep breath, and type: “Thank you for your comment.”

“Budget is a proxy for project planning” says Aidan Byrne: inaccurate budgets indicate project not well thought through
— Dr Inger Mewburn (@thesiswhisperer)

Aidan Byrne is the Australian Research Council’s CEO, and @thesiswhisperer livetweeted his presentation from the ANU Acton campus. The talk brimmed with tasty morsels for the Research Whisperers to chew on and, having half-written this entry already, it seemed an opportune time to get it out there!

What spurred me to write this post?

Not the bottom line (Photo by Tseen Khoo)

The fact that just about everyone leaves the grant budget till last.

No matter how many times I bring it up with researchers and their teams, and encourage early tackling of the budget, the poor thing ends up being rushed through, thrown together, or created from the ether.

This isn’t good for it. It can get resentful and make your entire application ineligible if you don’t pay enough attention.

This year’s ARC DECRA (ECR award), for example, has a ceiling of $131,740 per year in funding – over $90K of which goes towards the awardee’s salary. This leaves up to $40K as project costs. That’s it. You can’t argue for more; that’s just what the scheme is. If your project doesn’t fit into this budget, then this scheme may not be for you, or you would need to scaffold the project funding with commitment from other sources.

Many view the budget as a poor cousin to the regal elements of ‘track-record’ and ‘project description’, but they do it a disservice. The humble budget, properly conceived and executed, can be the foundation and catalyst for project efficiency and team bonding.

Finding that hard to believe?

Read on, because here are five ways that conquering your budget can help you conquer the project (or your grant application, at least):

1. You get to fast-track your insight into team dynamics

Putting together a grant application will give you an excellent insight into the collaborative practices of your colleagues: Are they keeping everyone in the loop? Is the leader leading, or are they phoning it in? How is your input received, and who gets listened to?

When you talk about money, that’s when you get to know your leaders and co-investigators (and their level of expertise) very well.

Working out the budget requires the team to have a very clear idea of the project and its direction. Nutting out the on-the-ground processes for how to carry out the work can be an organic process shared by a team, or a top-down affair.

Different ways can work – just make sure you’re happy with how it takes place.

2. You know where to go.

When the budget has been roughly blocked out in terms of what money is needed, you need to start fleshing it out. For example, you can’t just go to ‘South East Asia’ to do fieldwork. You need to go to Kuala Lumpur to interview X number of  people over Y weeks, then the same again for Singapore and Jakarta.

This level of planning has consequences for your foundational preparation for the project: if you’re going to be in Singapore for two weeks, who do you need to line up in that time, when will the interviews be, how are you meeting up?

Similarly, you can fudge a ‘visit archives’ item, but – as an assessor – I won’t be convinced about your level of knowledge about those archives unless you demonstrate to me (via project description and budget) that you know what you’ll be doing there. Is it a specific archive? How big is it? What are the processes for accessing the material (i.e. does it cost money per request, do you have to wait overnight for off-site stuff)?

You should feel like you have already walked through the entire project.

3. You work out who’s doing what.

This element may be obvious. The quantitative person is the one who is responsible for the quant surveys, and supervises the RA doing the subsequent quant analysis. Similarly, it makes sense for the prof with all the connections with the partner institution to liaise with the academics there (in the first instance, at least).

This is all fine and dandy as long as everyone is clear on project roles and opportunities. Research projects often entail fun stuff, like international conference-ing and snazzy fieldwork, or industry gas-bagging and sector reporting. But you don’t want to find out too late that you’re not going anywhere except to the library to get those Inter-Library Loans for the lead investigator. Or that you aren’t attending any conferences because Chief Investigators 1 and 3 are going, and not CI 2 (i.e. you).

As well as demotivating emerging researchers, having professors skim all the plum activities of the project doesn’t look good (because, y’know, it looks as if the professors have skimmed all the plum activities of the project…).

A part of any research project that features a mix of researchers and levels of experience should entail mentorship or ‘training’ aspects. An ECR should participate in a granted project and come away from it with more / better / deeper skills than before. And that should show up in the budget.

3a. Make sure your project cake has cash sprinkles on top.

If you are on a research team that includes multiple institutions, and you’re not the lead, work the project out so that – if the grant gets up – you have cash coming your way from the project. In Australia at least, this fulfils two functions:

a) it makes your institution very happy – having a researcher land a grant that brings no cash in for the university doesn’t get you many points in the competitive external funding basket, which can be important for promotion criteria. It’s also sometimes taken as a sign that you’re not very savvy about the whole funding game if you don’t manage to get a slice of research grant pie for yourself; and

b) it means that your work on the project, which should include having some support for research assistants, conferences or fieldwork, will be more easily reimbursed by your own institution than having to navigate the admin systems of another university to get your money back (or justify your spending).

4. You build your knowledge about research possibilities.

Working through a budget gives you valuable clarity about your project and its scope. It also trains you in the skill of knowing what’s possible (and useful) for your kind of research and its demands. A single-year project that has a ceiling of $10K on spending may not work for you at all – or would only allow you  to do a portion of collaborative brainstorming (which means a continued hunt for more $ to actually carry out the project work). This ability to judge rapidly whether a particular funding scheme is what you’re after can save you a LOT of time.

Incremental grants can be very useful, but remember that whole-of-project funding is what will get you to the next intellectual or career level.

5. You learn enough to delegate the task of putting together the budget next time!

In saying this, I don’t mean that you off-load the budget onto some poor unsuspecting research developer such as myself. It means that you have mostly worked out what you want, and can convey this to someone constructively. This post should be read alongside Jonathan’s earlier one about “Constructing your budget“. Then, you’ll be well and truly ready to conquer the project!

It seems appropriate to give the last word to our friends from the opening quote:

Don’t pad your grants! Says Aidan Byrne – evidence shows that panels judge you very harshly and will reject the application

— Dr Inger Mewburn (@thesiswhisperer) March 18, 2013

The issue of “padding the budget” came up in an associated Twitter conversation and will be the subject of my next post! Anecdotes about ‘padding’ advice are welcome (feel free to DM me @tseenster, or comment here).

“Dear research whisperer,

Before I start thinking about my next grant, I just wanted to get your gut feeling for what you think is going to happen with the application that I put in this year. Any thoughts?”

Dear applicant

‘After the Heist’ by Jonathan O’Donnell on Flickr

That is the hardest question that I face in my job, and one that I always resist answering. It comes in many forms: researchers want to know whether they will win the grant; administrators want to know whether they will meet targets; and bosses want to put hard numbers into workplans.

I know that some other research whisperers like to predict who will be successful and who won’t, but I don’t play that game. I like your application. I think that it is really strong. However, as Mark Bisby (former VP Research for the Canadian Institutes of Health Research) puts it, “It’s not a test, it’s a contest” (we love that quote). It doesn’t matter how strong your application is if the opposition is stronger.  We have no control over the relative strength of the opposition.

More than that, I don’t believe that I have enough data to make a confident prediction. If I can’t make a confident prediction, then I am guessing.  Personally, I don’t believe that guessing is a valid planning tool.

I don’t have enough data because there are so many external factors influencing the competition that I can’t predict or influence.

You’ve applied for the ARC Linkage scheme. [This is an Australian research funding scheme that requires matching funds from external partners - Ed.] Here are some of the external factors that might influence that scheme this year. This should give you some idea why I don’t like to guess.

• Changes in the university landscape: The overall number of applications should continue to rise as universities put more pressure on academics to write more applications. More applications means more competition.
• Changes in the economy: The overall number of applications may be down because the economy is in a bad way and so partner organisations are less willing to ‘risk’ money on research projects.  In Australia’s case, however, we seem to have escaped the worst of the effects worldwide, so that may not apply here.
• Local political changes: The overall number of applications may be slightly down because Victoria and Queensland had a change of State governments just before the closing date, so anyone relying on those governments to be partners would have had a hard time getting signatures.
• Changes in the scheme itself: The overall number of applications may be slightly down because the Australian Research Council (ARC) introduced a new requirement that every external organisation needed a Partner Investigator as well, and some people may have had trouble signing up their partners. I don’t believe this, though. Our university was able to get all of our partners organised, so I don’t see why everybody else couldn’t, too.
• Changes within the funding body: The ARC may have ripped a bunch of money out of this particular scheme to fund the new Industrial Transformation Research Program (ITRP), or there could have been other internal pressures on the overall funding envelope.
• Changes within the funding landscape: The ARC doesn’t expect to get any new money into the system in the current funding climate. The head of the ARC said as much in November 2012. That means that, no matter how many excellent applications they receive, they cannot increase the funding envelope.
• National political events: There will be an election in Australia this year. This won’t change the overall chances of success, but it will almost certainly mean that the announcement of results will be delayed. The ARC cannot announce results until they are signed off by the Minister. The government doesn’t make any major decisions once an election is called. So, if the Minister hasn’t signed off before the election is called, the ARC are stuck in limbo until the election is finished and they have a Minister who can sign off.
• National political changes: There may be a change of government. This shouldn’t really effect things too much, except to add delay while the new government sorts out its ministry.  People are always a bit nervous that the new government might make sweeping changes and, even though I don’t think this will happen, it makes everybody a bit jittery. The minister does technically have the right to refuse to sign of on one or all of the grants put forward for funding.

If I were to make a prediction about your application, I wouldn’t know what I was talking about.  That wouldn’t be fair on you, or on me.

Sorry that I couldn’t be of assistance this time.

Research Whisperer

Emily conducted her PhD at the University of Sydney on promoting fruit and vegetable consumption to Australian young adults. She graduated in 2012.

Her honours, masters and PhD projects had a combined budget of less than $400.

Emily is in the process of writing her first set of internal grant applications as an academic staff member, and is interested in the process of developing projects in the context of conducting research on a shoe-string.

I’ve been going through my paperwork from my student days recently. In the process, I found my funding requests for my PhD research. Not including conference travel, my research expenses for my PhD were $375.95.

That included a 1-month subscription to Thinkstock to allow me to buy high quality images for use in an online intervention to increase fruit and vegetable consumption, and the purchase of the domain name that I used for the intervention website. My Honours and Masters projects, and the research I’ve been running for the year since completing my PhD, have all been conducted at zero cost (except for my time).

Save money – by shopping (Photo by Toban Black – http://www.flickr.com/photos/tobanblack)

This means that in the last 6 years I’ve spent an average of $62.60 a year on research costs.

At research institutions, developing, submitting, and ultimately receiving, competitive grants is a key indicator of productivity and performance for academic staff. This means that obtaining a Category 1 grant (e.g. ARC Discovery or NHMRC Project Grant) is central to my career development.

Assuming that I want to progress in my career (spoiler alert: I do!) then I would be expected to apply for a faculty-level internal grant ($$), a university-level seed grant ($$$), then a Category 1 Grant ($$$$$$).

As a freshly minted academic staff member, I’m starting small with the preparation of a faculty-level grant (the maximum budget is $18,000, with all funds to be spent in a year). In the process of preparing this grant, I’ve had to think about spending about 47 times more on research than I have ever before. Obviously, I don’t need to ask for the whole amount, but spending months putting together a request for $62.60 in funding would be colossal waste of time for everyone involved!

So, given my history of tiny research spending, it’s not surprising that I’m finding the process of writing this internal grant (or, more precisely, its budget) challenging.

Over the years, I’ve become accustomed to designing research so that it has no (or very few) costs attached to it. But grants require expenses, so I’ve been spending the last couple of months trying to come up with a project that actually requires some funding. One of the difficult things with this is that most of the advice on how to write budgets assumes that you know what you want to spend money on, and – if anything – you want to spend more money than is allowed.

While trying to find ways to frame research questions and write budgets when I’m not used to having money to spend, I’ve reflected on the things that I have done over my research career that allowed me to spend very little on research.

To those of you who know me, it won’t be a surprise that most of these relate to the ways we can effectively use technology to facilitate research.

Below, I’ve listed ways to abandon everything I’ve learnt and increase your research costs (some tongue-in-cheek). Hopefully, this is useful for those of you out there who are struggling to create your budget!

1. Don’t use electronic data collection! Make sure all of your research materials are paper-based to maximise the amount of time needed for data entry.

After spending hours entering paper-based surveys into SPSS for my Honours research, I’ve ensured that all of my data collection has been electronic. Electronic data collection (either online or in-person) means that research data is entered directly into the study database. This is faster and less prone to error than manual entry, but it has one major downside. It’s too cheap! If you’re trying to get your budget up, you’ll have to budget for data entry time for a research assistant (or assistants), as well as all of the printing and dissemination costs for your paper based materials.

2. If you must use electronic data collection make sure to use expensive (preferably custom-built) software.

There are lots of excellent open-source programs out there for data collection. I use the open-source survey software LimeSurvey for online surveys, and for completing in-person data collection when a computer is available. Limesurvey allows for conditional questions, a range of response formats, and is completely free. It’s so flexible that I now use it to help run a lot of my intervention studies (a colleague used it to deliver a web-based Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) program for people with coeliac disease).

If you’re trying to keep your budget high, don’t even think about whether there are open-source software options that would be suitable for your project.

For the best results, include the design and development of software in all of your grants. It’s especially good to make sure that the program is so complicated that you and the research team don’t own it and can’t make changes to it on your own. Ongoing development and support costs will really help to keep your budgets high over the life of your research career.

3. Don’t automate anything.

My final PhD project involved sending an automated email to every participant once a day for 30 days (200 participants x 30 = 6000 emails). People could sign-up at different times, so I would be sending Participant 1 email #23 at the same time as sending Participant 55 email #3. For my PhD, I fully automated this process so that participants would sign-up to the study, complete the baseline questionnaire, be sent their daily emails, then complete the follow-up questionnaire. Once it was done, I’d receive email notification that their data was complete.

An earlier study in my PhD required me to send emails manually every 3 days to 100 participants for a month. I processed these by hand. The automated email system took 2 days to set up and now runs projects for several other researchers I know. The manual system took about 2 hours every morning (24 days over the life of the project) and sent me slightly insane.

The great thing about research funds is that you can use them to pay research assistants, who cost a lot of money and save your sanity without the need for automation. If you want to make sure your budget stays high, don’t automate anything. This would only take away valuable hours for your research assistants to do mind-numbing work.

Note: If you’re a grant reviewer reading this, please don’t cut my budget in half! I have finally managed to develop a project that does involve legitimate costs. It has electronic data collection, open-source software and automation, but requires a time-consuming testing procedure. I really do need all the money, I promise.

Keystone (Photo by Jonathan O’Donnell)

A while back, one of our Twitter followers asked whether The Research Whisperer had any posts about project management.

At the time, I could only think of @jod999’s megastar post about what a Gantt chart is, and mine on whether you can fix a broken Gantt chart.

While Jonathan’s post was about planning and putting in place a feasible and ideal timeline, mine talked about the common mistakes and remedies for timelines that don’t behave.

Research projects are very much about project management, and that tweet nudged me in the direction of this post.

Project management skills are elements that many sectors require, and this means that there is a weighty bunch of pixels already dedicated to the topic. For a great recent post on research project management, read @evalantsoght’s “Smart way to manage a large research project” at the Next Scientist blog.

Rather than rehearse what many others have already said (better than I could), I want to focus on someone  you should consider requesting as part of a major research grant:

Get yourself a project officer or a project manager. 

Why would you want such a person?

Because they make your research life worth living!

Seriously, a good project officer who is dedicated to your team and its work can boost the productivity of the entire gig. They concentrate on ensuring things are on track and perform that essential project management function of judicious nagging (I do a fair bit of this myself – on many fronts – and it works).

What do those in project management roles do?

• They navigate the HR and recruitment jungle for project personnel (students and staff). Employing staff requires an impressively annoying amount of work.
• There’s the regular ‘check-in’ liaising with project partners and other collaborators that should be done. It’s easy to lose track of this level of connection, and it’s not enough only to inform them of milestones.
• Project officers provide a consistent point of contact for media, broader university administration and the funding body.
• They know where everyone is in the project (physically and productivity-wise).
• Often, project officers also manage project finances.

Can I have one?

A range of funding schemes allow you to budget for a project officer for the duration of the project. This person is distinct from a research assistant, but can sometimes be the postdoc fellow or associate.

If your funding scheme won’t allow you to put on a specific person to do this stuff, there are a few options:

• It might be worthwhile giving someone on the research team responsibility for this role. They can delegate to others, but there needs to be one person who stays on top of the project as a whole and knows what’s coming up.
• Check with your organisation about what admin assistance they might provide for your project – you may need to fight for this (e.g. getting a day a week from an existing staff member, or having your School fund a person for you). Usually, it’s best to arrange this kind of thing when you’re putting the project application together, and get it in writing!
• If you’ve just scored a shiny grant, though, it can be effective to say: “Well, if I don’t get X amount of project management assistance, I’ll have to write to the funding body to say that I can’t do the project because my university is unsupportive…” (or similar). Very few universities would let grant money escape their clutches. As always with ultimatums, this is a last resort. Don’t throw down gauntlets if you can’t follow through on the duel.

You may have to compromise on your ideal, but ensure you get the best possible environment for getting that project done. You should always have a Plan B should your organisation stick to its denial-of-admin-assistance ways.

In addition, think about how much work would actually be done by someone in this kind of position. If your project will be compromised significantly without this role, think about scaling down or adjusting the way you’ve planned it.

If you’re a solo investigator, and it’s not a big enough grant for you to be able to heave your weight around, it’s a perfect opportunity to learn all the ropes of project management. This means that, in your future of uber-shiny grants, you’ll know exactly how to delegate and appoint (because you’ll actually know what needs to be done…). Win-win!

Dr Ben Kraal is a Research Fellow at Queensland University of Technology (QUT) in Brisbane, Australia. He works with the People and Systems Lab on various projects.

In the broadest sense, what he does can be described as Design Research. Ben’s background is in what people call “IT”, though he has spent most of his time thinking about how people use technology in their work and life.

His PhD was about the lived experience of people who use large vocabulary speech recognition systems in the workplace.

Ben tweets from @bjkraal and blogs at Not Easily Obvious. 

Chalk trains (Photo by Ben Kraal)

Recent ideas for “fixing” research grants have proposed long-term grants as a potential solution.

Nobel Prize-winning astronomer, Brian Schmidt (ANU), proposed the idea and it showed up in a Minister’s speech too.

As a post-doc on soft money, long-term grants only seem to solve the problems of established professors whose problem isn’t getting grants, but keeping their lab or group liquid for the medium to long-term.

I fear that long-term grants will turn the early career researcher’s (ECR) problem of getting a grant into the problem of getting a job. But with fewer, bigger projects about, that could get harder, not easier.

With a five-year window for refreshing the pool of money that’s around, the stakes get higher not lower.

Let’s engage in some (pessimistic) scenario-planning: What happens if the ARC scraps 3-year Discovery grants in favour of grants with a 5-year time-frame?

These 5-year grants might not just fund a project, but might fund a lab more generally. A professor in charge of a 5-year-funded lab would be wise to have several projects on the go and at several different timescales.

It would be sensible to plan for expensive long-term projects with a guaranteed pay-off and cheaper short-term projects that are riskier (or, if you like, more innovative). You’d keep some money aside for taking advantage of short-term projects that pay off, or for spinning off new projects if the wider research environment changes.

These long- and short-term projects would need people to work on them. As a post-doc or ECR, the best type of project to be associated with would be a long-term one that’s a continuation of your previous research. But post-docs and ECRs are expensive compared to PhD students and, if the project is a slow burn with a guaranteed payoff, it’s the perfect kind of thing for a PhD project or two. In this situation, the short-term riskier projects will be staffed by contract post-docs.

Even in the best case, a student who starts their PhD at the beginning of a five-year project might get a two-year post-doc from it. By then, they’re an experienced researcher who’ll be wanting some security. In the best case, the lab will get another 5-year injection and one, or maybe two, lucky post-docs will get to stay on and cement their track record. Some (many?) PhDs will move into industry, but the rest will be left in the same position many ECRs are now — looking for stability but taking short-term contracts, with little opportunity to build a track record.

An even more pessimistic scenario is that long-term grants will put a use-by date on ECR PhDs.

If you want to stay in academia but aren’t lucky enough to have a supportive Lab director after that first post-doc, you’ll be competing for your next contract with newly minted PhDs who are cheaper and have more recent experience.

In fact, this is the situation right now:

One respondent said: “I desperately want to stay in research but I’m … being pushed out due to: student researchers being cheaper to employ to do the same thing I do in the lab. … I’ve hit the top of my pay scale and can’t move up the ladder without obtaining a grant. [SOURCE]

These proposed long-term grants might keep a Lab going, but they really aren’t addressed at the concerns of researchers starting out.

I have another fear about long-term grants and that’s for mid-career academics.

A long-term grant will be a really large amount of money. The average 3-year Discovery gets $300,000 and a 3-year NHMRC gets closer to $600,000, so a 5-year grant could easily touch seven figures.

In the long-term grant scenario, assuming you’ve been fortunate enough to have two solid post-doctoral contracts and you’re looking to establish your own beachhead, you need a lab and labs are funded by 5-year grants. But you’ve never led a project with more than a part-time RA. Will the granting body give you a cool million? It’s hard enough to get a small Discovery with that sort of track record. In the long-term grant world, how does an mid-career researcher (MCR) get the sort of experience necessary to lead a 5-year project?

Let’s get even more pessimistic: An MCR who misses out on a 5-year grant a few times hasn’t had the opportunity to build the kind of really strong track record that’d be necessary to get one. There’d also be the problem of MCRs competing for long-term grants against established labs.

For me, as an ECR moving into being an MCR, long-term grants don’t solve any of my problems and could possibly exacerbate them.

ECRs and MCRs need shorter term funding that’s easier to get.

Right now it’s not clear if long-term grants are even a policy option that’s seriously being considered. But it is worth talking about because it would be a major change in policy that will have consequences.

Are these the consequences we want?