Integrating Literature & Funding Searches

Investigators need to show funding agencies that their work is important, necessary, innovative, and well-founded. These attributes are largely determined by the eyes of the beholder, the funding agency. So, to be able to create an argument for sponsors, an investigator must be confident in their project and how it fits in the larger field of work and must understand how to communicate that to the sponsor. This is done by conducting a comprehensive literature search, as well as conducting a comprehensive funding search, and you'll save time and realize the most robust results if you can integrate both of these searches.

Literature Searches
Last year, ORDE offered a seminar in partnership with the Auraria Library to help investigators integrate these two important themes. Lorrie Evans, Research and Instruction Librarian offered the following tips to investigators when conducting a literature search.

• Ask/Meet with a Librarian: Librarians can help you to identify silos outside of your area of focus, and perhaps in other disciplines that are relevant to your work.
• Familiarize yourself with the capability of key databases: To have confidence that you're finding everything you need, learn the limitations and functions of the databases you're using (your librarian can give you insight into "what's under the hood" of your database)
• Search scholarly literature by the number of citations: You can find seminal pieces in your field and other fields by finding those that are highly cited.
• Capture/Save your work: The Auraria library website allows you to save your literature searches when you enter your credentials. This can save you time from having to remember what you searched and where from session to session.
• Use a reference management tool: These tools allow you to capture the literature that is relevant to your work, tag these articles, and directly import your references to a Bibliography. There are many tools available, including EndNote, Mendeley, Sente, and Zotero.

Fund Searches
At the same time that you're using these tips to find and scan the relevant literature, you want to be framing your work to make it a contender for funding. Here are some tips from ORDE to do this.

• For faculty members, meet with ORDE and let us conduct a fund search for you. We work with you to understand your research and then provide you with a search document that outlines relevant sponsors, deadlines, program announcements, and more to familiarize you with the funding landscape.
• Know what projects are being funded in your area.
• Once you identify sponsors that may be a good fit for your research, dig deeper to understand the history, ideology, and preferred approach for research to ensure that your project is a good fit and/or to help you align it with the sponsor's interests and goals.

Integrating Searches
If you are intentional about integrating your literature and fund searches from the get-go, you'll likely find that it saves you time, but also gives you a more dynamic outlook on your research that will allow you to make the best decisions for you and your project(s).

To integrate, we suggest that you use your Aha! moments to remind yourself to dig into the other side of your search. When you discover something in the literature, take that same element and work to understand if that discovery has been funded or is being funded and which sponsors are or may be interested in the work. On the flip side, when you discover a related project that is currently being funded, can you delve into the scholarly literature to anticipate what other projects will be necessary or what other gaps in the literature there are surrounding that project that would be good candidates for funding.

In moving back and forth across the literature and funding landscapes, you can feel confident that you are developing research that has the best chance at success.

Resources
ORDE Website
Auraria Library Website
Video Clip on Literature Searches - Lorrie Evans