Review - Essential Learning for Grant Development

Grant development guru, Robert Porter, Ph.D., at the University Tennessee, has said that serving as a reviewer is "like a graduate education in grant writing" (Porter, 2011). He suggests that although early career investigators often assume that they will not be good candidates for review panels due to their junior status, it's wise to engage with Program Officers (POs) by sharing an early write up of your research project and to offer to serve as a reviewer.  It is often a challenge for POs to find the right review panel for all of the grant proposals they receive, and to offer to serve in this capacity certainly can't hurt.

If you aren't asked to serve as a reviewer, it still behooves researchers to understand the review process as best they can and to let it guide the development of their grant. The NIH offers an extensive description of their review process, as does the NSF (see below for both). Many institutions host mock peer reviews with senior researchers reviewing the grants of their junior colleagues. This might happen at the departmental level, or for a particular type of grant.  For instance, the CCTSI that serves the CU Denver | Anschutz Medical Campus offers mock peer review for their NIH Pre K program and K to R program.

At the very least, it is essential to have a few diverse colleagues review your grant proposal before submitting to catch any points of confusion or areas where your grant can be strengthened.

Porter (2005) offers some tips from seasoned reviewers that can provide guidance to those who have yet to experience the review process for themselves.

Adapted from Porter (2005)

It's important that researchers always write their grants for their reviewers. But, the more experience and insight you can gain into what those reviewers want, especially by being a reviewer, will improve your grant development.


Resources
More Paper Out the Door: Ten Inexpensive Ways to Stimulate Proposal Development (2011) - Robert Porter
What Do Grant Reviewers Really Want Anyway? (2005) - Robert Porter
NIH Peer Review Process
NSF Merit Review Process

Tools for Grant Organization & Clarity

This spring, ORDE offered a seminar on Grant Writing Structure and Mechanics, and heard from Ritu Chopra, Ph.D., Executive Director of the Paraprofessional Research and Resource Center in our School of Education and Human Development.  The center is completely grant funded, and as its leader Dr. Chopra spends much of her time on grant development.

As part of her presentation, she offered up a couple of tools she uses to both organize her projects and to clearly communicate to grant reviewers. These are an Index of Priorities and a Logic Model.

Index of Priorities
Dr. Chopra began including an index of priorities in her grants to the Department of Education to explicitly show where in her grant proposal she was addressing each of the sponsor's priorities. She and her team would comb through the entire RFP, identifying all of the priorities and items that the sponsor was asking for and then outline those in a table of priorities. Under each priority, she would identify exactly where in the proposal (page number/section) her team had addressed it. This tool made it easy and clear for reviewers to see exactly where and how the center had responded to each of the things that were important to the sponsor.

Note: If you're thinking about using an index of priorities, make sure that your sponsor/RFP allows its inclusion in your grant.


Logic Model
Another tool that Dr. Chopra recommended was a logic model. A logic model is quite simply a table that identifies the following:

• inputs: resources that will go into a project
• activities: tasks that will take place in the project
• outputs: direct results of the activities
• outcomes: the benefits realized from the activities
• impact: the broader effects of particular project activities

Below is a simple illustration of the logic model components from the Pell Institute's Evaluation Toolkit

These logic models can serve to help your team clarify and develop your project, but can also communicate clearly to a sponsor what you will be doing in your project and the implications for your project.

Use the resources below to learn more about using logic models and to see examples.

Resources:
Program Development and Evaluation - University of Wisconsin Extension
Evaluation Toolkit - The Pell Institute
The Evaluation Center University of Colorado Denver

Authorship, Impact, and Independence

This week, The Chronicle of Higher Education offered an interesting piece on authorship which outlines one scientist's account of navigating an authorship system in her field. Dr. Cecile Janssens describes finding scholarly articles where she was listed as an author or collaborator without her knowledge and then offers clarifications on what constitutes an author or collaborator, honorary author, etc.

Authorship is significant, especially in a scholarly career, yet many researchers make various assumptions about the systems and implications within authorship. This week we follow Dr. Janssens' cue and work to clarify a few key issues around authorship across disciplines.

Whose on first?
Researchers are generally clear on how multiple authors should be ordered in a publication. But, as more and more interdisciplinary research is being conducted, it's important to discuss the variety of author order rules in each collaborator's field. For instance, in many of the health sciences, the last author position is most significant, followed by the first. In many of the Sciences and Education, it is the first author who is considered the greatest contributor. The rest of the authors are ordered by their contributions, where the 2nd author has made the 2nd largest contribution, etc. In fields like Mathematics and Engineering, authors are often ordered alphabetically.

Regardless of field protocol, the publication you're submitting to will usually dictate how authors should be ordered. However, collaborating authors should be aware of any differences in case they are evaluated using a different system. If you're not sure what the norm is in your field, the accepted system is usually that of your field's style guide.

What are the career implications of authorship?
Being first (or sometimes last) author on publications is important for researchers to show their growing independence to evaluators in the tenure process as well as those reviewing their grants. However, many sponsors are recognizing that with the growing diversity and collaborative nature of research and the corresponding publications, it is difficult to assume what one researcher's role is.  As a result, sponsors are starting to allow for explication of a researcher's roles in different projects and publications in their biosketch. This is true for the tenure process as well. Bob Damrauer, Ph.D., Associate Vice Chancellor for Research and Special Assistant to the Provost at CU Denver | Anschutz Medical Campus says that it's important for faculty going up for tenure to describe their role in each collaboration and project. In fact, Dr. Damrauer says that the tenure review committee will often ask the candidate for more information if they don't describe their roles in significant projects/publications.

Communicating authorship upfront and more than once
Given the close connection between promotion and funding decisions based on numbers of publications and author order, it's not surprising that contentions can arise when research collaborators wait until a project is underway or complete to figure out author order.  This is why experts in team science recommend agreeing on these sorts of things at the outset of a project. When reaching out to collaborators, it's important to have a candid discussion about what's in it for each person, and what their role will be. This helps to prevent a collaborative relationship from souring and/or a research project from ultimately failing.

In addition to this, Dr. Gerald Fischbach, a seasoned researcher at Columbia University recommends having these discussions any time there is a change in the research team or the project makes a shift and requires other types of expert who may take on a larger role that the original PI.  See Columbia's guidelines and a short video clip of Dr. Fischbach here.

Being clear on these distinctions and complexities of authorship can help you to navigate your research career effectively. Please see the resources below for even more information.


Resources:
Let's Clarify Authorship on Scientific Papers - Chronicle of Higher Education
Author Ranking System: 'Impact Factor' of the Last Author - Blog: In the Name of Science...
Responsible Authorship and Peer Review -  Columbia Center for New Media Teaching and Learning

Creating & Maintaining a Productive Research Team

More and more, it is common for researchers to collaborate, developing grants and working on projects together. Given the big problems of our day, bringing together multiple perspectives and areas of expertise makes sense. Yet, researchers often take for granted the work necessary to build and maintain a highly functioning team.

This week, we offer some tips from experts and consultants in team building and team science that can be applied to your research group to improve productivity, creativity, and the experience/benefit of all team members.

Don't draw on your close connections
Research has shown that teams or collaborations that include people with weak connections to each other tend to be the more creative than those with strong connections between team members. Brian Uzzi, Professor of Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management attributes this to the diversity of thought and resources that are more likely to be present in a team with weaker connections to one another. So, although it is generally easier to collaborate or draw on the expertise of the usual suspects with whom you have strong relationships, you may be able to create a more dynamic research team drawing on those with whom you have less of a relationship.

Take time for process
Pat Sanaghan (President, The Sanaghan Group) points out that exceptional teams tend to spend about 1/3 of their time on the group's process instead of the task at hand. This open discussion about how the team will work together and what everyone's role will be is important to the success of the team. This does not mean that once you've had an initial discussion about process, you're all set. Checking in with your team to discuss what's working and what's not on an ongoing basis is important in maintaining team health and success.

Define the research problem
One challenge that confronts diverse research teams is getting all investigators on the same page as to what the research problem and project are and how to address it. Dr. Lyall and Dr. Meager with the The Institute for the Study of Science Technology and Innovation (ISSTI) warn that without consensus from the team - you may end up with a multidisciplinary project rather than an interdisciplinary project. Using facilitation tools, such as a Mind Map, to bring your team together to brainstorm and make connections can start your team off in the right direction.


Resources:
Ted Talk: Teaming Up to Drive Science - Brian Uzzi
5 Secrets to Developing a High-Performing Team in Higher Education - Pat Sanaghan and Jillian Lohndorf (Academic Impressions)
A Short Guide to Building and Managing Interdisciplinary Research Teams - ISSTI