Peer review has developed over time to become the established procedure for assessing and assuring the scientific quality of research. Nevertheless, the procedure has also been variously criticized as conservative, biased, and unfair, among other things. Do scientists regard all these flaws as equally problematic? Do they have the same opinions on…

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…

With current constraints of public funding of research the question of principal investigator (PI) success has gained prominence. Yet understanding grant success remains problematic. While often associated with peer acceptance of the proposal text, research fundability in large part is informed by PI participation in the social systems of research…

Background: Pilot project programs offer early-stage and other investigators support to pursue emerging research areas, explore new methodologies, gain experience as principal investigators, and collect pilot data needed to pursue larger extramural research funding, such as from the National Institutes of Health. Pilot project programs may be…

Impact statements are increasingly required and assessed in grant applications. In this study, we used content analysis to examine the 'comments on impact' section of the postal reviews and related documents of Science Foundation Ireland's Investigators' Programme to understand reviewers' "ex ante" impact assessment. We found three key…

Background: The content presents a conceptually powerful and attractive framework for understanding the proposal development process to capture the complexity of the steps that contribute to successful grant writing. Based on experiences from 15 years in research administration and using real-life examples, the author juxtaposes the diverse roles…

The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship of overhead rates on research application award success. The pressure to maximize overheads to fund the indirect costs associated with operating a research-intensive university and the perception that higher overhead rates disadvantage research proposals create an unhealthy tension between…

In this article, the authors describe critical issues related to the pursuit of rigorous and innovative research in the fields of mathematics and science education. The paper is framed to help researchers consider aspects of both their research project and their research proposal. The authors describe features of high-quality and fundable research…

Bibliometric benchmarking can be an aid to researchers pondering whether to apply for competitive grants. In this paper, the highly prestigious grants offered by the European Research Council to young scientists of any nationality were scrutinized. The analysis of the 2014-2015 data indicates that over 75% of life science grantees in the starting…

The national need for higher education research has increased over the years with the growth of societal issues. Funding for this research is often acquired through competitive grant proposals due to the lack of internal funding in most universities. The skills required to write the grant are sometimes lacking and represented in current literature…

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…

Running a grant program for the first time can feel overwhelming. The work is time-consuming, requires attention to many details, and is accompanied by pressure from applicants who are desperate for money and prompt decisions. This article presents a list of all of the factors educators have to consider. From establishing a timeline and drafting…

Sharing scientific research data has become increasingly important for knowledge advancement in today's networked, digital world. This article describes the evolution of access to United States government information in relation to scientific research funded by federal grants. It analyzes the data sharing policy of the National Science Foundation,…

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…