Title (mis)deeds?

Just a brief post this month, as befits a look at one of the shortest sections of a research proposal – its title. The title is almost certainly the part of your proposal that will be read first, and it may well be the one single bit of text that’s read the most.

First impressions count

Picture for a moment a tired reviewer, working late into the evening to get through a pile of proposals. They put down the one they’ve just read with a weary shake of the head and reach for yours, scanning the title to get a quick heads-up as to what it’s about. Why should they care enough to read on past the title? It’s a question you should already have asked yourself, and in answering it you hopefully aimed a bit higher than ‘because that’s what they’ve signed up to’.

The title is an opportunity to create a strong first impression, catch the reader’s eye and give them a good flavour of what’s to come. It should inform, intrigue and entice the reader – even the weariest of cynics – and hook them in, making them want to find out more. It sets the scene, predicting the content of the proposal and reflecting its aim, focus and key messages. Its job is to confirm to the reader that yes, this is something they really should be interested in.

This is quite a task for a single short sentence or phrase to accomplish. And it’s made more challenging by the fact that shorter certainly is sweeter when it comes to titles. I’d suggest aiming for a maximum of 20 words, and ideally no more than 15. You might even consider limiting it to ten.

Here’s an example of a proposal title that I think is rather nice. It’s based on something I found on the web:

The role of psychosocial factors in treatment compliance among HIV-positive patients

Okay, it’s 11 words long, not ten or less. But it’s still succinct and punchy, fitting easily onto a single line and containing no flab or waffle. It packs in a lot of good information – we now know exactly what the proposal is about. We know the main group of people that it involves, the specific behaviour of interest, and the variable/s under examination that could affect that behaviour. Contextual cues give a good indication as to the importance of the proposed research. Armed with this knowledge, the reader can very quickly decide whether the proposal is likely to be of interest to them. If it has been submitted to the right funder, the right funding call and/or the appropriate panel, and if it addresses the funder’s guidance, remit and objectives, then it’s reasonable to hope that the answer here will be ‘yes’.

Get the essential information to the front

Even though a good title should only be short, it’s nevertheless well worth trying to front-load it with those words and phrases that work hardest to catch the reader’s attention and spell out exactly what the proposal is all about. Take the following example:

A cluster-randomised pragmatic trial to evaluate the effectiveness of hyperbaric oxygen therapy for treating non-healing wounds in diabetes

This is perfectly adequate – it does the job. It’s not too long (18 words) and it certainly tells us clearly what the project is about. But I think it could be improved. Specifically, I might point out that we’re fully ten words into the title before we get any clue as to what the research is actually about. And it’s not until right at the end that we discover it’s about diabetic wounds. There’s scope to front-load the title with that information, and perhaps in doing so reduce word count a little. Here’s my effort (11 words in total):

Hyperbaric oxygen therapy in non-healing diabetic wounds: A cluster-randomised pragmatic trial

Proposal acronyms

Sometimes an acronym is conjured up as part of, or as an adjunct to, the proposal title. Some people just love a nice project acronym, and presumably at least some of those people are themselves reviewers. I’m quite partial to a good acronym (or proposal short name) myself, so long as it’s catchy, appropriate to the proposal’s focus and not too obviously forced. So for the above example, we might consider something like the following:

HEALS: Hyperbaric oxygen therapy for Effective Amelioration of Long-term and Slow-healing diabetic wounds – A cluster-randomised pragmatic trial

While an acronym certainly isn’t the be-all and end-all of a good proposal title – I daresay no project ever missed out on funding for want of a killer acronym – a decent one provides a strong and easily-recalled identity for the project. Consider this; your proposal will (hopefully) get discussed by a panel or committee, and its members will typically refer to it using a short-hand version of the name. Would you rather they referred to it is as ‘HEALS’, or ‘the one about hyperbaric oxygen treatment’? 

I’m really not keen on acronyms of the ‘AWFUL’ variety though: rAndomly-generated acronyms that alWays Fail to impress because they're only tenUously connected with the proposaL.  And please – the titles I’ve used above are just intended as illustrative examples, so if a pragmatic cluster-randomised trial would not in any way be appropriate in this context then hopefully you’ll accept my sincere apologies and spare me the anguished emails…

Don’t forget the rest of the proposal!

Importantly, while the title (and indeed acronym) may well be the first part of your proposal to get read, it doesn’t need to be the first thing you write. Certainly, don’t get stuck in the name-hunting loop at the expense of getting on with the proposal itself. This can become quite a rabbit hole, and for the procrastinators among us it can prove very tempting to put off the hard work of writing in favour of knocking about some promising titles and acronyms. If necessary, just come up with a working title and re-visit this when the bulk of the writing work is done. Often a good title will emerge organically from the writing process.

Practising what I preach?

And what of the title I’ve chosen for this blog post? Well it’s certainly short, and I think it gives a pretty clear indication of what the post is about. I’ve also sneaked in a pithy little word play, which pleases me at any rate; probably too frivolous for a research proposal, but acceptable in a blog.

The views and opinions expressed in this blog are mine alone and are in no way endorsed by my employer. Factual information and guidance are provided on a 'best-endeavour' basis and may become out of date over time. No responsibility can be taken for any action or inaction taken or not in respect of the content of this blog. 

‘Academic’ writing and ‘normal’ writing – really so different?

We write for various different reasons – to educate and inform, to record, to persuade and convince, sometimes to entertain. Above all, we write to communicate. As writers we have a message that we want to pass on to someone else, and as when passing a ball we want to make sure it gets to the recipient safely. Lob the ball two metres over your team-mate’s head and you only have yourself to blame when it bounces out of play. Toss your reader a load of impossible-to-follow gibberish and you cannot expect them to grasp what you’re trying to tell them. I can’t think of many modes of writing to which all this doesn’t apply.

A large part of most academics’ workload involves writing for various purposes, and these outputs mostly fall within the definition of what’s commonly termed ‘academic writing’. For many, the writing style that has come to be associated with academic writing is more or less synonymous with sophisticated and often-arcane prose peppered with recondite terms, highly-technical language, and lengthy multi-part sentences – often ill-structured – whose numerous subordinate clauses introduce and juxtapose several abstruse concepts (see what I’ve done here?). It never opts for a short, simple word if a longer, more high-falutin’ one is available. Why just ‘use’ something, when you could utilise it instead? It’s an exclusive form of writing that confers membership of a club on the relative few who can understand it, and excludes lesser mortals.

Why would you write like that?

I have a theory about how and why this approach to academic writing has come to pass. I think it stems from the fact that most people’s first-ever experience of academic writing is the undergraduate essay. Faced with writing something on a scholarly or technical subject about which we know very little, and aware that our efforts will be judged by intimidatingly-clever experts and rated at least in part on the basis of quantity as well as on quality, we scrabble around desperately for a means of filling five or six pages with prose that’s at least not transparently-obviously utter nonsense. We grasp desperately for the two complementary strategies available to us that seem to offer a solution; verbosity and obfuscation. And before very long we have produced pages of long-winded waffle, sparsely populated with the scant few facts that we have in our possession. It’s neither incisive nor easy to read, but that’s kind of the point – maybe Prof will just throw in the towel and give it the benefit of the doubt!

Assuming the essay scrapes a pass, we’re already well on the way to internalising the notion that clarity of meaning is not central to the discipline of academic writing, and that long-windedness is a winning strategy. We’re reinforced in this by what we see around us – everyone’s at it, so it must be the way forward.

Now I realise that the academic world can be quite protective of its mores and traditions, and I also understand that as a non-academic myself I’m on distinctly spongy ground if I launch unilaterally into a polemic against one of these. I could baldly state my claim that academic writing and plain-language writing (sometimes referred to as plain-English writing) should be synonymous, but my aim when blogging is always to inform and persuade, not to indulge in the sort of controversy-stirring that normally leads to mudslinging on Twitter. I can almost hear the cries of protest – my readers are intelligent and well educated, and they don’t need to be patronised!

So let’s explode the first myth; plain-language writing is not condescending to the reader. Don’t just take that from me – here’s what the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the major national funder of health and medical research in the US, has to say on the matter:

“Plain language is grammatically correct language that includes complete sentence structure and accurate word usage. Plain language is not unprofessional writing or a method of ‘dumbing down’ or ‘talking down’ to the reader.”

Lest we’re is any doubt (NIH is American, for example, and we all know they do things a bit differently over there), let’s consider the advice that the University of Leeds Library Service gives on the subject:

“Academic writing is clear, concise, focussed, structured and backed up by evidence. Its purpose is to aid the reader’s understanding. It has a formal tone and style, but it is not complex and does not require the use of long sentences and complicated vocabulary.”

Let’s deconstruct this slightly. They refer to ‘formal tone’, and that’s important. Plain language is always clear but its tone is often neutral, and it certainly doesn’t have to be – indeed often shouldn’t be – chatty. Contractions, for example, like ‘it’s’, ‘you’ll’ and ‘won’t’ are fine in this blog post, but definitely not okay in a journal paper or research proposal (I once saw a grant reviewer complain in their feedback about the single instance of ‘it’s’ that had slipped unnoticed past the final proof read).

And what of the statement that complicated vocabulary is unnecessary? Even though I’m not an academic, I’m not completely naïve here. I understand that academics write challenging stuff about difficult-to-understand topics. What if you’re writing a paper on the role of ryanodine receptors in the sarcoplasmic reticulum membrane, or a research proposal about singlet exciton fission in single-junction solar cells? Well, let me make my own suggestion here; the language used throughout the piece should only ever be as complex as it needs to be. Sure, there’s no easily-accessible synonym available for most technical terms, but don’t make it even harder for the reader by stitching them into long and rambling sentences, and surrounding them with other needlessly-complex words. And accept that while the ‘methodology’ section of the singlet exciton proposal will inevitably be pretty heavy going, the ‘impact’ section should be clear and straightforward.

The laws (well, writing-style rules) of Nature

I cannot think of a more convincing means of promoting the ‘use plain language’ message than to point out that it’s exactly what Nature tells its journal authors to do. Admittedly they don’t actually use the term ‘plain language’ – perhaps that would just be a bridge too far? But their guidance for authors is nevertheless based squarely around the very fundamentals of plain-language writing. Let’s take a look at it.

They start by reminding us that many of their readers will not be native English speakers. The likely degree of heterogeneity within almost any readership in this and other respects is certainly worth keeping in mind. Will non-specialists read your research proposal, for example, and perhaps lay readers too? Might mainstream-media journalists access your journal paper? Nature does go on to acknowledge that their journals are read mostly by professional scientists, and recommends that authors “avoid unnecessary simplification or didactic definitions”. As we saw above, it’s a misconception that either of these is a key feature of plain language, although of course a lay summary does need more by way of simplified ‘explainers’ than the main text will. But Nature also issues the following caveat: “However, many readers are outside the immediate discipline of the author(s), so clarity of expression is needed to achieve the goal of comprehensibility.” The second part of that sentence might seem so obvious as to not need stating, but it’s hard to disagree with.

Next comes another key tenet of plain-language writing – favouring use of the active rather than the passive voice: “Nature journals prefer authors to write in the active voice (‘we performed the experiment...’) as experience has shown that readers find concepts and results to be conveyed more clearly if written directly.” Few would claim that the passive voice should never be used (see what I did there?), but like vodka and profanity it’s best used only in moderation. This Grammarly blog post examines the difference between active and passive voice if you’re interested.

Nature continues: “We have also found that use of several adjectives to qualify one noun in highly technical language can be confusing to readers.” Well it just so happens that use of unnecessary adjectives is very much the antithesis of plain-language writing. Furthermore, “we encourage authors to ‘unpackage’ concepts and to present their findings and conclusions in simply constructed sentences.” Simply-constructed sentences are another fundamental characteristic of plain-language writing.

When it comes to high-falutin’ language, Nature is once again on right board: “Many papers submitted for publication in a Nature journal contain unnecessary technical terminology, unreadable descriptions of the work that has been done…” Plain language is specifically designed to be readable, and once again their guidance espouses some fundamental plain-language principles.

“Our journal subeditors and copyeditors edit the manuscript so that it is grammatically correct, logical, clear and concise. […] Of course, this process is assisted greatly if the authors have written the manuscript in a simple and accessible style…” Well, quite. Statements like this make me feel quite warm inside…

Pretty much every main aspect of plain-language writing gets a look in. “We ask authors to avoid jargon and acronyms where possible” – another key principle ticked off. They end by re-emphasising the importance of “clear and accessible writing”. Nature has in essence unpackaged plain-language writing, and instructed authors to write in plain language without actually using the term itself.

For my own part, I’ve come to realise that if something isn’t written clearly then it often means the writer doesn’t really understand it. As Einstein once said, “If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough.” In a research proposal, this is often because the writer is trying to describe and justify a research project that they have yet to plan out properly – they don’t actually know yet exactly what they’ll do, how they’ll do it, who will do what and when it will be done. How can anyone write clearly about something that doesn’t exist yet?

And what of ‘utilise’?

Usage and Abusage, Eric Partridge’s classic reference guide to good use of the English language, is uncompromising on this word’s lack of linguistic merit: “utilise is, 99 times out of 100, much inferior to use; the other one time it is merely inferior.” If ‘utilise’ does have a distinct meaning beyond being a more pretentious alternative to ‘use’, it’s perhaps to describe a situation where something is put to practical and effective use, maybe a use for which that item was not originally intended. For example: ‘the crow utilised an old skewer to retrieve the nut from the hole’. Even here though, ‘used’ would have done the job perfectly well.

So just do it!

It seems then that plain language isn’t just a minor sub-genre or writing style, to be dusted off and employed occasionally for things like lay summaries, press releases and study-participant information sheets. Rather, it’s an overarching set of principles that will benefit pretty much every mode of writing, and should certainly inform our approach to writing things like research proposals, journal papers and REF case studies. In fact, any form of writing where the aim is to convey a message clearly and convincingly to the reader. And you don’t just need to take my word for that.

The views and opinions expressed in this blog are mine alone and are in no way endorsed by my employer. Factual information and guidance are provided on a 'best-endeavour' basis and may become out of date over time. No responsibility can be taken for any action or inaction taken or not in respect of the content of this blog. 

Fully funded research fellowship? I want one of those!

For an early-career researcher (ECR) looking to carve out a career in academia and make the eventual transition to research independence, the funding landscape can look dauntingly sparse. It’s a super-competitive world out there, and while options such as the UKRI Research Councils’ standard-funding schemes may in theory be open to some ECRs looking to win substantive funding (you’ll need to have an employment contract in place with your eligible host institution for at least the duration of the grant), the reality is that you’ll be up against some very senior, very experienced competitors. As I write this, many higher-education institutions in the UK are strapped for cash, meaning that research-focused ECRs who have yet to pull in some substantive grant funding often feel vulnerable and may struggle to secure long-term research positions.

One potential funding stream that can look very attractive to those in the early stages of a research career is the fellowship route. Although not exclusively the preserve of the ECR, many research-fellowship schemes are specifically designed to support less-experienced researchers to develop professionally and to gain the valuable knowledge, skills and experience that will equip them for a career as a leading independent researcher.

Fellowship scheme features

While every scheme is different, fellowships commonly include the following features:

• Salary support for the fellow for some or all of the duration of the fellowship, in addition to support for eligible project costs
• Time and resources set aside for skills acquisition and professional development
• A commitment from the host institution to support the fellow, during and sometimes after the fellowship period
• A mentorship/sponsorship support element, providing input and guidance from experienced senior academics
• A requirement that most or all of the fellow’s working time is devoted to the fellowship

Budget finances may be set at a particular limit or, in some cases, uncapped. UKRI-funded fellowships and some others include an element of overhead funding to cover institutional costs, which will warm the hearts of those people in your institution charged with balancing the books. Securing such funding won’t do any harm for your standing in your department, faculty and institution either. Some ECR fellowship schemes specify a maximum limit for the number of years post-PhD in their eligibility criteria, while others take a more flexible approach and assess each applicant on a case-by-case basis. Some funders offer several different fellowship schemes, with each being designed to support researchers at a particular stage in their career.

Nothing not to like so far, then. Unsurprisingly, however, competition for early-career fellowship places is intense, even in the absence of much more experienced senior applicants. Funders are looking for the very best candidates, with the best research ideas and projects, hosted within the institution/s that are best-placed to support them. I point this out not to deter would-be fellowship applicants – all of us probably question our credentials from time to time, and succumb to occasional bouts of imposter syndrome – but simply by way of a reality check. If you’re planning to go to the effort of putting together a fellowship application (and trust me, they do require some effort), then an objective self-appraisal with close reference to the funder’s criteria and evaluation guidance is a very useful starting point.

Bear in mind though that very many senior academics got to the top without ever winning fellowship funding, so it’s not for everyone and it’s certainly not the be-all and end-all of a successful academic career. In some ways, securing a fellowship is more like winning a prize than, say, getting a job or even being awarded a standard research grant. And by definition, there’s not room at the very top for everyone – not everyone can win the big prize. That said, someone has to win it, and you’re only an excellent proposal and perhaps an interview away from that someone being you. So if after some dispassionate self-reflection you still have the stars firmly set within your sights, then by all means shoot for them.

A catalyst to make special things happen

Key to determining whether you’re competitive for a fellowship scheme – and, if you are, to informing how you should pitch your fellowship proposal – is the answer to the question “why should anyone give me a fellowship?” Or, more specifically: “How will fellowship funding add value over and above standard project-grant funding?” In other words, what are the special things that will only happen if you’re awarded a funded research fellowship?

Let’s assume that your proposed research project is a good one. You’ve chosen a scientific, societal and/or economic problem that’s demonstrably worth addressing, and you’ve set a suitably-ambitious yet achievable project aim that promises to make an impact against that problem. Your research objectives seem likely to deliver your aim, and they’re backed up by a novel, robust and well-thought-out methodological approach. You have the right team on board, and access to the research environment and infrastructure that you’ll need to complete the project successfully. On balance then, you have a project proposal that would seem to be highly competitive for some flavour of standard project-grant funding. So why not pursue that?

When they grant a research fellowship, a funder is investing in two things: your project, and you. Sure, they’re looking for a great project, and scientific or scholarly excellence and possibly impact potential are likely to be important evaluation criteria. But funders understand that you’re an early-career researcher, and as such they’re not expecting you to change the world. Not yet, at any rate. Rampant over-ambition in a fellowship proposal will kill it just as surely as a stolid, cautious approach that smacks of comfort-zone dwelling and a lack of vision. What they really do want though is a thoroughly invest-able individual who shows great potential for future impact (scientific, scholarly and/or societal) as one of tomorrow’s research leaders. And they’re looking for individuals who might not fulfil all of that wonderful potential without the catalysing spark that fellowship funding would provide. Consider the following hypothetical example:

Anya is a postdoctoral researcher in the area of computational modelling who has had a successful career to date with some good papers and other outputs to her name, having made a significant contribution to research. She’s started developing her own ideas and research questions around using computational-modelling techniques in oncology, stimulated by but diverging from the research that she’s doing with her current supervisor (whose focus is in the field of cell growth and tissue mechanics). Her supervisor isn’t very interested in pursuing this new research direction though, and in any case their institution, The University of Here, doesn’t really have the resources or expertise needed to pursue it.

However, Anya is aware that in another institution, The University of Somewhere Else, there’s an academic whose laboratory is doing some of the most exciting cutting-edge research in computational oncology, working within a very well-equipped facility. Moreover, in a different department at that institution, another leading researcher is working in the separate but complementary (for Anya's research) discipline of artificial intelligence in radiology, within which Anya will need to gain new skills if she’s going to pursue this new research direction. The University of Somewhere Else is keen to recruit and support promising early-career researchers like Anya who are working in her particular field, and after discussions with the academics and departmental heads involved they agree to support a fellowship application for her to come and work there.

Assuming that Anya’s research ideas are good ones, if she can identify a funder whose mission and remit would be served by the project and by the future potential of her interdisciplinary research focus (several funders spring to mind) then she has an excellent chance of attracting fellowship funding. Importantly, without such fellowship funding she may never get to pursue her novel ideas, and her long-term potential for future impact in an important area of medical science might never be realised. Fellowship funding is very clearly the essential catalyst here for making something rather special happen.

Do I have to move institution then?

The fellowship in the above example involved a move to a new institution. This was once more or less a prerequisite for securing a fellowship, but it’s perhaps less so now as acceptance grows that, for various good reasons, excellent researchers don’t necessarily need to be highly mobile. Examples of leading researchers who still work in the same institution where they completed their PhD and even their undergraduate degree abound. Nevertheless, consider this: is the team, group, department, faculty and institution that you’re in now demonstrably the very best place to pursue the next stage of your research career? If you’re genuinely among the best of the best then the world really is your oyster, so you’ll be expected to feast on the juiciest bits of whatever’s on offer out there.

Certainly, you’ll be expected to build things like external mentorship, time spent in other institutions or groups, externships and other horizon-expanding activities into your fellowship proposal to show that you’ve put together an integrated package of high-quality experiential opportunities and support. Equally, it’s absolutely essential to show that you’re branching out in a new direction, moving away from your supervisor and expanding your own research horizons, rather than simply developing ideas and activities that fit within the bailiwick of your existing group and/or represent a linear continuation of whatever it is you’re going at the moment. If you’re at a very early stage in your research career, be warned that fellowship funders are emphatically not looking for ‘PhD 2.0’!

So not all fellowships look like the above example, not all involve a move to a new institution, and there are different ways of putting together a strong fellowship proposal that will resonate with the funder. But all successful fellowship proposals will have in common an essential ‘added-value’ element that makes the case for investing in the individual and their future potential, enabling them to pursue and achieve something worthwhile that they might not otherwise be in a position to do.

The Wellcome Trust gives some helpful case-study examples of successful fellowship scenarios in their guidance for applicants to the Sir Henry Wellcome Postdoctoral Fellowship Scheme (Word document – see page 3).

So how do I show that I’m invest-able?

You’ve put together a great project based on a novel idea, and you can describe it clearly and compellingly. You’re planning to do the research in an excellent environment and you’ve lined up appropriate support from leading academics in the field. This already goes a long way to demonstrating your invest-ability as a would-be fellow. But there’s no getting away from the fact that evaluators will want to see evidence that you are what you claim to be – an ECR with clear potential to become a leader in your field. Perhaps the easiest way for them to do this is to look at what you’ve already achieved to date by examining your track record. This is something you can’t really do much about in the short term, but over the longer term it really pays to take a strategic approach to developing a track record that, when you need it to, will back up your claim to being among the best researchers at your particular career stage.

Your publications record is an obvious starting point, and reviewers will typically look for a reasonable number (for your career stage) of first-author publications across a decent spread of high-impact journals. Depending on your field and discipline there might also be books, book chapters and monographs. Other outputs and contributions to research like abstracts, conference presentations, invited lectures and similar will further build your track record, as will indicators of esteem such as prizes and awards. Internal and external (to your institution) positions and responsibilities that you’ve taken on, such as editorships and editorial-board memberships, professional-society leadership, institutional committee posts and other administrative roles, will all evidence a willingness to contribute, lead and make your voice heard. Anything that shows early evidence of leadership, initiative and nascent research independence really is a definite a plus.

Depending on your career stage, one thing that can be great to have in your track record is some evidence that you have already sought and won some research funding in your own right. Of course, if you’ve previously secured substantive funding as the principal investigator then this is likely to rule you out of most fellowship schemes, as you’ll be deemed to have progressed too far down the road towards research independence to be eligible. But bidding for and winning small pots of funding will send a clear message that you’re branching out in your own direction and seeking to pursue your own research agenda. It will also demonstrate that other funding bodies have considered you to be invest-able, and it can help to give comfort that you have some experience of undertaking, managing and delivering a research project. A track record of contributing to other projects as a co-investigator can be helpful in this respect too.

Another really important indicator of your invest-ability as a research fellow is the extent to which you have a vision and a plan for your future development as an academic researcher. You will need to set out clearly what your ambitions and career aspirations are in this respect, and describe convincingly – and specifically – how the proposed fellowship would support these. To this end, you’ll need to put together a concrete training plan for the fellowship, in which you describe the package of learning and skills-development activities, opportunities and experiences that will equip you for your transition to research independence. This essentially involves a gap-analysis exercise, to determine:

• What skills, knowledge and expertise you already have
• What you will need in addition to these in order to complete your fellowship and subsequently succeed in your post-fellowship career
• What you can build into your fellowship plans to address these needs       

OK I’m sold – where can I find a funded research-fellowship opportunity?

There is quite a wide range of different research fellowships available in the UK from a number of different funders. Some accept applications in a broad range of disciplines or even any, while others are focused on a particular discipline or subject area. 

UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), the umbrella body for the UK’s government-funded Research Councils, is currently co-ordinating the Future Leaders Fellowships scheme, under which applications can be submitted in any discipline (or combination of disciplines). Most of the individual Research Councils run their own remit-focused fellowship schemes too. The Medical Research Council, for example, has several different schemes available for ECRs.

Several large research-funding charities also fund fellowships. The AXA Research Fund, for example, is a scientific-philanthropic organisation that supports fellowship projects in the broad areas of health, environment, new tech and socio-economics.  Many charities focus their research efforts in quite a specific area – the Wellcome Trust, for example, funds fellowships that serve their scientific remit of improving health, while others such as the British Heart Foundation and Cancer Research UK have an even more focused remit.

Researchers in the health and medical sciences (the area within which I work) would seem to be particularly well served for fellowship opportunities – other funders in this area or research include the National Institute for Health Research and Health and Care Research Wales. Researchers in the humanities and social sciences shouldn’t despair though – fellowships in these disciplines are offered by several different funders, including the British Academy and the Leverhulme Trust.   

The views and opinions expressed in this blog are mine alone and are in no way endorsed by my employer. Factual information and guidance are provided on a 'best-endeavour' basis and may become out of date over time. No responsibility can be taken for any action or inaction taken or not in respect of the content of this blog. 

Learning to love the 'impact' sections of research proposals

Most funders will expect you to describe the anticipated impact of your proposed research project. They often provide a dedicated section of the application form for doing this – for example an ‘impact summary’ section.

For the many research proposals, particularly in the life sciences, real-world impact is fundamental to justifying the very point of doing the project at all. In some cases – charities in particular but also government health-research funders such as NIHR and Health and Care Research Wales – it’s pretty much all the funder really cares about. It’s their way of understanding what they’re actually getting for their money in terms of real-world change for the better.

This is all pretty straightforward. So why do the ‘impact’ sections of proposals cause so much head-scratching, consternation and angst? I think there are probably two main reasons for this.

The first is around academics’ motivation to apply for research funding and carry out research projects, which is not always focused primarily around impact. The reality is that this motivation is multi-faceted, and key motivators might include the fact that the applicant just really loves doing the science; has a loyal team of researchers whose jobs depend on continued funding; needs to secure a certain amount of research funding to gain promotion; or wants to show Bob down the corridor that they too can score large grants from prestigious funders. All good and noble reasons for writing a research proposal, but of course none of them will cut any ice with the funder.

The second reason is that, in reality, any single research project tends just to be one small piece in a much larger jigsaw. A stepping stone towards an eventual real-world outcome. It’s fairly seldom that one isolated piece of research leads directly to clear-cut, real-world change on its own.

For these reasons, plus the fact that most academics clearly like writing about their science but seem to dislike writing about all the other stuff that funders ask them for, the impact sections of a proposal often get left until last. This approach however flies in the face of the oft-quoted advice to “start with impact” – not just by writing the impact section/s first but actually starting your project planning by thinking about what you aim to achieve in terms of contributing towards real-world change.

So what should you write about in an impact summary? What can you say that will be honest, proportionate, realistic and achievable, while also piquing the funder’s interest in a way that will hopefully get them reaching for their wallet?

Summarising impact – what to cover in an impact summary

Every project should have a primary aim – if yours doesn’t then your proposal is probably in a bit of trouble. The project aim should normally encapsulate a very succinct statement of the intended impact – the ‘what’ that underlies the rationale behind doing your project and the short answer to the “what’s the point?” question.

I discussed some of the ins and outs of describing project aims and objectives in my last blog post. To recycle an example from that post, a hypothetical project in the area of cancer detection might aim to: improve outcomes for patients with ovarian cancer by determining whether the presence of elevated levels of (a biomarker) in the blood provides a reliable means of early detection, thereby reducing late-stage diagnosis rates and improving survival outcomes. The intended impact summarised very succinctly here is clear – fewer people dying of ovarian cancer because they’re getting diagnosed earlier. But it doesn’t tell the full story. The ‘impact’ section of a proposal should map closely to the project’s stated aim and should expand on it, while also indicating clearly how this aim fits into the broader impact jigsaw.

     

A recommended approach to writing about impact in a research proposal is to do the following:

1. Identify who will benefit from your project, or from the eventual impact towards which it’s intended to build.
2. Describe how they’ll benefit.

It’s often simplest to split the impact section into two parts that deal respectively with each of these points beneath appropriate sub-headings.

Who will benefit?

A ‘stakeholder’ is a person or organisation with an interest or concern (i.e. a stake) in something. In addition to the research team and their institution, there will normally be a number of stakeholders (or stakeholder groups) in a proposed research project. When you’re describing who will benefit from your research, don’t just talk vaguely about ‘key stakeholders’ – spell out exactly who these stakeholders are. In a typical life-sciences project like the ovarian-cancer example above, they might include:

• A particular group of patients, or people at risk of becoming those patients
• Those patients’ families and/or carers
• Clinicians and other professionals responsible for providing care services to the patients
• The organisation/s that employ the clinicians – for example the NHS in the UK
• The parts of government responsible for setting policy, strategy and/or legislation and regulations that apply to the care services – including devolved government across the UK
• Specific businesses that could benefit by exploiting the project’s findings – these might be partnering on the current project, or they could be lined up to collaborate in the next stage of bringing the innovation to market
• Whole business sectors – part of ‘UK Plc’ which may stand to benefit from a particular new technology developed by the research
• The funder (they’re paying for the research, so they have a clear stake in the project and its outcomes)

When writing about beneficiary groups it’s generally sensible to deal with them more or less in order of importance. Patients would generally top a list like the one above, and even for proposals that aren’t directly focused on patient outcomes it’s often people that matter most in impact terms (think jobs, environmental quality, long-term health and general well-being). It’s why the hypothetical ovarian-cancer project’s title mentions patients but not oncologists or the NHS.

Notable by their absence from the above list are members of the academic community – other researchers in the same and related or otherwise-connected disciplines. Certainly, nearly every research project will have considerable benefits for the academic community by way of new knowledge, new models and new methodologies produced. But for most funders, ‘impact’ actually means real-world impact that benefits society (e.g. by improving health) and/or the economy (e.g. by saving the NHS money). For this reason, they commonly ask applicants to write about academic beneficiaries elsewhere in the proposal. So as a general rule, don’t mention academic beneficiaries in your impact summary, and if you must then do so briefly and then simply refer across to the part of the proposal where they’re dealt with in more detail.

There is however an important reason why you might want to refer briefly here to your academic beneficiaries, and it’s linked to the realities of the impact jigsaw described above. Taking the example of the hypothetical ovarian-cancer project, there won’t actually be tangible benefits for any of the above beneficiary groups at the end of the project. In the best-case scenario, there will be some new scientific knowledge about the ability of a biomarker to indicate the presence of a particular type of cancer. At this stage, that information is only really of any use to the research community, who may in due course take it forward and – perhaps in partnership with NHS clinicians and pharmaceutical companies – progress it through further research and development towards the eventual goal of real-world impact. So in this example, securing effective academic impact in the near term will be a key stepping stone towards achieving the longer-term impact goals, and it’s important to show a clear understanding of this and of the need to make provision for ‘next-steps’ activities.

How will stakeholders benefit?

Once you’ve identified the main stakeholder groups then it should be a fairly simple matter to explain how you anticipate they’ll benefit. It’s important to be as specific as possible here, but also proportionate and realistic.

For the primary beneficiary group in the above example (patients), the nature of the intended eventual impact is very clear – better outcomes, longer post-diagnosis survival and fewer deaths from cancer. Ideally, it’s always nice to be able to quantify the size and extent of impact. For example, how many patients with ovarian cancer are currently diagnosed at a late stage, how many die each year, and what sort of reduction in these numbers might a new biomarker-based early-detection technique realistically achieve? This last figure will of course have to be an approximate estimate, but if you make sure this is reasonable, realistic and informed by the available facts then the reviewer is likely to accept it – they won’t have a better figure of their own.

Along with the patients themselves, their families will also see obvious benefits. These will include economic benefits if the incapacity or loss of a breadwinner is prevented.

For each of the other beneficiary groups you’ve identified, describe the anticipated ultimate impact that they’ll see from your work. Sticking with the ovarian-cancer project, clinicians will have access to better and more effective treatments for their patients, while the NHS could stand to benefit financially if there are cost savings associated with fewer people needing treatment at later stages of the disease. If there’s a national strategy in place for dealing with cancer, then the intended impact outcomes will have positive implications for the parts of government responsible for that strategy. And if bringing the new diagnostic test to market will include subsequent collaboration with industry then there’s clear potential for the industry partner/s – perhaps specific named companies – to benefit financially. Finally, if the funder is a medical-research charity then they will have specific charitable aims, a mission and a vision. So they’ll benefit directly from projects that serve their agenda.

One more thing: if you also have to write a ‘pathways to impact’ statement, then don’t just go and repeat everything that you wrote in your impact summary. The pathways to impact statement is not about what impact you anticipate achieving, but rather what steps you can reasonably take to maximise the chances of that impact happening. Writing this will be the subject of a future blog post.

And that’s about it. If you can list some specific real-world beneficiary groups and describe convincingly how they’ll benefit from your project then you should have the makings of a sound impact summary. If you can’t, and you’re not a theoretical physicist or mathematician, then you might just have to re-think your project.

The views and opinions expressed in this blog are mine alone and are in no way endorsed by my employer. Factual information and guidance are provided on a 'best-endeavour' basis and may become out of date over time. No responsibility can be taken for any action or inaction taken or not in respect of the content of this blog. 

Aims and objectives – knowing the difference and understanding their relationship

The words ‘aim’ and ‘objective’ have quite similar meanings, and indeed in common parlance we often use them pretty much interchangeably. Other alternative words that we sometimes use in this context include ‘goal’, ‘intention’, ‘target’ and ‘ambition’. In a research proposal though, it’s essential to understand the important distinction between aims and objectives, and to appreciate how they sit alongside each other in your description of your putative research project.

Project aims

When it comes to a research project, the aim is normally a fairly broad and general statement of aspiration or intent. The earliest an aim is likely to be realised is at the end of the project, and it may well be the case that it has to be longer-term than the project’s duration. A statement of a project’s aim should encapsulate what you want to achieve in a way that people in the real world can understand and relate to; in other words, it should go a long way to answering the critical ‘what’s the point?’ question.

In my view, a project will often have two main aims, which can be ordered hierarchically. Firstly, the project’s overarching aim will relate directly to the problem that the research has been designed to address. This is certainly the case for any proposed project where the identified impact relates ultimately to a societal or economic problem (I use the term ‘problem’ in a broad sense – i.e. something that needs addressing, alleviating or sorting out in some way). So a research project’s overarching impact aim might be, say, to improve outcomes for people who have been diagnosed with a particular cancer.

This is great, and clearly very worthwhile, but in reality there is unlikely to be any actual amelioration of cancer outcomes on completion of the project or even fairly shortly afterwards. And it may be that cancer outcomes never actually improve as a direct result of the project in question. We have to be realistic here – while the overarching impact aim is typically a fairly long-term ambition, we must also be able to state a project aim that is somewhat shorter term and whose achievability is not too heavily tied up in factors that may be beyond our control. To give an indication of how the research will build towards the overarching goal, we generally need to state what the specific aim of the project is, against which the project’s success or failure could be judged. So a research project’s specific aim might, for example, be to validate the efficacy of a potential new early-detection test for a particular cancer that is normally diagnosed at a late stage, leading to poor clinical outcomes.

The specific aim will usually be closely linked to the project’s main research question or hypothesis. In the above example, the hypothesis might be that the presence of certain levels of a particular biomarker in a person’s blood is a reliable indicator of the early stages of a given type of cancer.

It’s often useful to state the overarching and specific aims of a project together, either as a compound aim statement or using adjacent sentences. Once again using the above example, this might take a form similar to one of the following:

This project aims to improve outcomes for patients with ovarian cancer by determining whether the presence of elevated levels of (a biomarker) in the blood provides a reliable means of early detection, thereby reducing late-stage diagnosis rates and improving survival outcomes.
 

This project’s overarching aim is to improve outcomes for patients with ovarian cancer by increasing early-diagnosis rates. Specifically, it will address this goal by testing whether the presence of elevated levels of (a biomarker) in the blood may be used as a basis for reliable early detection.

So how many aims should you state for your project? One may be sufficient, perhaps a composite of a ‘big-picture’ overarching aim and a more ‘drilled-down’ specific aim. Or it may be the case that it’s appropriate to articulate one or two subsidiary aims, related to but separate from your primary aim. There’s no official limit on the number of aims, but include too many and your project risks starting to look unfocused and/or over-ambitious. Alarm bells should probably ring if you have more than three aims.
    

Project objectives

Project aims represent an excellent means for a reviewer to determine quickly whether the focus of your proposed research seems to be important and worthwhile. But on their own, they can be a bit ‘motherhood and apple pie’. Sure we want to improve cancer outcomes – who doesn’t? And if there might be a way of developing a new test for earlier detection of a particular type of cancer then why not explore its potential? On their own, though, the aims give no indication as to the credibility of a project in terms of its feasibility, appropriateness and chances of success. Funders want to back research that addresses important problems, but they want to pick the projects that seem most likely to succeed.

Objectives are different from aims in a research proposal. Where the aim states what you want to achieve, the objectives set out the main steps that you’ve identified you’ll need to take in order to achieve it. In other words, they summarise the how. All objectives should map clearly to your aim/s, and an evaluator who reads your proposal should reasonably conclude that if you succeed in meeting all of the project’s objectives then there’s a decent chance you’ll achieve your aim/s.

It’s often stated that every project objective should be SMART:

• Specific – state precisely what you’re going to do
• Measureable – if you can’t measure it, how will you know when you’ve achieved it?
• Achievable – you’ll need to be able to accomplish all of your objectives; ambition is good, but over-ambitiousness raises a red flag
• Relevant* – does it relate directly to and support delivery of the project’s aim?
• Time constrained – objectives are shorter term than aims; can you achieve the objective within the lifetime of your project and according to the project schedule you’ve set, taking into account the possibility of delays?

* the ‘R’ in SMART is sometimes defined as ‘Realistic’ – but I think that overlaps too much with ‘Achievable’ 

Leaving aside the charge that someone has focused more here on coming up with a pithy acronym than on setting out a definitive list of the five most important characteristics of a project objective, the SMART approach will certainly help you to define a set of appropriate objectives for your project and its aim/s. It’s always a worthwhile exercise to test each of your project objectives against the SMART criteria to make sure they hit the mark. Aside from anything else, an evaluator may well do this too.

Because I’m not a biomedical scientist (nor indeed any sort of academic researcher) I won’t make a fool of myself by attempting to dream up some suitable objectives to match the aim of my hypothetical cancer-biomarker project above. But I do know a tiny bit about feasibility studies – small-scale versions of a larger clinical trial that are designed to establish whether it’s actually practicable to carry out the full-scale trial. In a hypothetical example of such a study, the aim might look something like this:

To evaluate the feasibility of trialling hyperbaric oxygen therapy alongside conventional treatment for patients with idiopathic osteonecrosis of the femoral head, as a means of reducing pain and improving mobility.

A (non-definitive) list of research objectives designed to address this project aim might reasonably include the following:

• Determine the infrastructure needed for a full-scale clinical trial
• Test the proposed trial design
• Evaluate and qualitatively explore practical considerations and compliance of clinicians in using the therapy
• Assess appropriateness of the training manual and consistency of training provided to participating clinicians
• Quantify the number of patients required for a full definitive trial
• Assess the efficacy of processes for patient recruitment and consent – and determine common reasons for non-participation
• Assess the quantity and potential patterns of missing data
• Test the feasibility of collecting the proposed outcome measures for a full trial
• Decide whether a fully-powered trial is appropriate

You’ll note that the above example objectives begin with an ‘action’ word, for example ‘determine’, ‘quantify’, ‘evaluate’. Each one is a concise statement of intent.

Be careful not to mix up research objectives with project objectives. It may be that you will need to complete face-to-face interviews with 20 patients and five clinicians, but that’s very much a project objective and it doesn’t really capture a meaningful research goal. Cover project objectives and milestones in the sections dealing with project management and timelines.

Do also make sure that none of your objectives simply re-states your aim, perhaps in similar or even near-identical terms. Remember – the aim is the ‘what’ of your project, the objectives are the high-level ‘how’, so they really shouldn’t ever be the same.

So how many objectives should you have? To some extent this should answer itself, depending on what you want to achieve and the methodology you’ve selected to achieve it. If you’re going to split your project into work packages, every work package should deliver at least one objective, and every objective must be addressed by a work package. You might list as few as three to five research objectives, or it could sometimes be necessary to list as many as ten. Much more than this though and you might want to take a reality check – have you perhaps included some project objectives, or possibly just tried to break things down too far?

The views and opinions expressed in this blog are mine alone and are in no way endorsed by my employer. Factual information and guidance are provided on a 'best-endeavour' basis and may become out of date over time. No responsibility can be taken for any action or inaction taken or not in respect of the content of this blog.