Despite the increasing recognition for the scientific and societal potential of interdisciplinary research, selection committees struggle with the evaluation of interdisciplinary proposals. Interdisciplinary proposals include a wider range of theories and methods, involve a more diverse team, pose a higher level of uncertainty, and their…

The increasing need for innovative research driven by rapid global changes gives doctoral supervisors of early-stage researchers a significant role in facilitating the ethical conduct of qualitative research. In the context of European Commission funding, the demands of research ethics and integrity place a tremendous responsibility on the…

Canadian University Institutional Review Boards (IRB) assess action research proposals based on the ethical protection of participants, the methodology, and any potential implications for human participants involved in the qualitative study. There are more disadvantages than advantages through this ethical review process.This positional paper…

Beginning researchers get an overview of qualitative research through a concise look at the practice of conducting research and the theory and debates that keep qualitative inquiry vibrant. Ideal for introducing the novice researcher to the theory and practice of qualitative research, this text opens students to the diverse possibilities within…

To blind or not researcher's identity has often been a topic of debate in the context of peer-review process for scientific publication and research grant application. This article reports on how knowing the name and experience of researchers/institutions influences the qualification of a proposal. We present our experience of managing the…

Researchers regularly deal with ethical considerations when writing up their research. However, such considerations are rarely addressed in existing research ethics literature. Here, the focus tends to be on ethical considerations that arise in relation to research proposals and "protocols," that is, during the "process" of…

This study applied a content analysis methodology in two ways to evaluate first-year students' research topics: a rubric to examine proposed topics in terms of scope, development, and the "researchability" of the topic, as well as textual analysis, using ATLAS.ti, to provide an overview of the types of subjects students select for a…

The process of writing successful grant proposals has received not so dubious attention in the last several decades. This article provides contextual significance resulting from a review of literature spanning 1975 to 2013. I identify essential vocabulary stemming from the literature review to familiarize the reader with the terminology associated…

Qualitative research has moved from the margins to the mainstream in many domains of scholarship. Yet, biases against how qualitative methods can best address important research questions still persist. The present article provides reflections regarding my experiences of proposing and reviewing both qualitative and quantitative research grants for…

Taking the establishment of structured doctoral programmes in Germany as an example, this paper focuses on how knowledge production in certain academic fields reshapes their doctoral education in a widely changing policy context. Based on case studies of eight graduate schools in three research fields, namely economics, life sciences, and…

Our Introduction to Research Methods course is a first-year majors course built around the idea of helping students learn to work like chemists, write like chemists, and think like chemists. We have developed this course as a hybrid hands-on/ lecture experience built around instrumentation use and report preparation. We take the product from one…

This article reports the results of a mixed methodology analysis of the assumptions of academic staff and Masters students in an Iranian university regarding various aspects of the assessment of the Masters degree thesis, including the main objective for writing the thesis, the role of the students, supervisors and advisors in writing the…

This paper reports on the results of an analysis of the research proposals submitted to the MOOC Research Initiative (MRI) funded by the Gates Foundation and administered by Athabasca University. The goal of MRI was to mobilize researchers to engage into critical interrogation of MOOCs. The submissions--266 in Phase 1, out of which 78 was…

This article explores learning opportunities offered by students' written reflections as they learn through writing an action research proposal. From tapping into students' reported struggles, I analysed data using three stages of qualitative data analysis: data reduction, data display, and conclusion drawing (Miles and Huberman 1994). It emerged…

While much feedback research in L1 and L2 writing has been conducted in pre-university and university contexts, little attention has been paid to supervisors' comments at the graduate level. Specifically, the nature and role of supervisors' commentary on the writing of graduate-level academic genre is under-explored. Designed to fill such an…