Over the last decade, the idea of societal impact resulting from publicly funded research has changed from being a relatively fringe concern related to high-technology entrepreneurship and spin-off companies to becoming an increasingly important public policy concern. This has stimulated academic science policy research to investigate the impact…

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…

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…

Research into university study abroad programs suggests that while students may have some experience of local culture(s) and practices, they may be achieving no more than a superficial understanding of the host society. Alternatives to the standard study abroad models are thus essential to encourage students to engage more deeply with the host…

Although many studies have shown that reviewers particularly value the feasibility of a proposed project, very little attention has gone to how applicants try to establish the plausibility of their proposal's realization. With a sample of 335 proposals, we examined the ways applicants reason the feasibility of their projects and the kinds of…

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…

Across higher education, teachers have been inspiring themselves (and others) to apply pedagogical innovations grounded in a unifying intention: to prepare students for labour markets and societal challenges. Research-based education has been funded to promote pedagogical innovations with valuable impact on the students' academic success and/or…

This article examines practice-based teaching methodologies found in the studio-based design critique ('crit'), and how they can be adapted to essay-based modules in the Humanities. Based on a small case study of a masters level module on film theory at a British university, the group crit was introduced as a mode of experiential learning in order…

Although existing scholarship offers critical insights into the working mechanisms of project-based research funding, little is known about the actual practice of writing grant proposals. Our study seeks to add a longitudinal dimension to the ongoing debate on the implications of competitive research funding by focusing on the incremental…

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…

Designing your own study and writing your research proposal takes time, often more so than conducting the study. This practical, accessible guide walks you through the entire process. You will learn to identify and narrow your research topic, develop your research question, design your study, and choose appropriate sampling and measurement…

The past three decades have witnessed a sharp reduction in the rate of growth of public research funding, and sometimes an actual decline in its level. In many countries, this decline has been accompanied by substantial changes in the ways that such funding has been allocated and monitored. In addition, the institutions governing how research is…

This paper provides insights into the evaluation of educational research in order to strengthen research projects and increase the quality of evidence about what works to improve student learning from the lens of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education. In particular, TEAMS hopes this publication will increase the…

This paper reports on an investigation into the effectiveness of teaching research methods in library and information science (LIS). A review of the literature revealed that the LIS community is engaged in a continuing debate about the most effective means for teaching research methods courses in master's-level LIS programs. Many LIS master's…

This study examines the use of peer review in an undergraduate ecology programme, in which students write a research proposal as a grant application, prior to carrying out the research project. Using a theoretical feedback model, we compared teacher and student peer reviews in a double blind exercise, and show how students responded to feedback…