Back in November I mentioned that I hoped to get some sanity back into my life and schedule in December. Well, I had a brief break between Christmas and New Year and then things got busy again. I can’t believe that it is already March and I haven’t been blogging for over three months.

Lots of things have been happening, not the least of which is the 2010 Canadian budget. Last year I was pretty active in this discussion, but since I’m already late to the party – all I’ll do is point you towards Rob Annan’s thorough review on Don’t Leave Canada Behind. I’m not sure that I consider this budget a great one, but it is certainly much better than last year.

I’m still not sure if I will be doing more blogging in the near term, but I thought that I would throw up a post to show that I’m still kicking around.

Catch you sooner or later.

We’re getting down to the wire and I can bet that there are quite a few people that are just starting to get organized to write their proposals. If you are a regular reader, you know that I encourage an early start to ensure that adequate preparation goes into the proposal. That said, surveys of academics in North America suggest that the average researcher spends about two weeks on grant preparation*. So, if within the next three weeks, you can find ‘80 hours’ to commit to proposal preparation get out of those starting blocks!

I put ‘80 hours’ in quotes because I don’t know one person in academic research (or in many professions) where a work week equals 40 hours. More like 80 hours per week, although theoretically you could work over 100 hours a week, if you needed little sleep and had no other life to speak of. I am not sure that I could sustain the mental energy to do that on a regular basis, but I have been known to have short bursts of insanity occasionally.

In any event, if you are on a more moderate schedule, it would probably be a good idea to pull out your CV, review and update it, if you haven’t done so already. I’ll be posting a few CV related tidbits tomorrow.

*I can’t find the darn reference – but when I do, I’ll update the post. If I am being honest, don’t expect it until after fall granting season, i.e. December.

The next few weeks are going to be dicey, so I am not going to commit to posting regularly. Boy, this sounds just like the intro to last week’s recap . . .

If you would like to subscribe to this blog feed, just click on the orange RSS logo on the upper right hand portion of the screen – or you can use the subscribe function in your web browser.

And, for anyone that is visiting the blog for the first time and would like to see post summaries, use the drop down box on the left sidebar to search for the category “recap” or click this link and you will find posts that summarize the blog topics over the past few weeks.

Here is a recap of last week’s posts:

DG2010 – Programs versus projects talks a little bit about how important it is to ensure that your NSERC discovery proposal describes a program of research. An excerpt from the peer review manual was added to the post on Friday.

Views on proposal writing is a mashup of blog posts from academic bloggers espousing their views on grant proposals.

DG2010 – References covers a few tips and tricks to think about when you are writing and proofing your reference list for your NSERC discovery grant application. These tips are also relevant for other documents that include reference lists . . .(read: journal submissions)! I belong to the Council of Science Editors and you wouldn’t believe the amount of editorial research that is done on reference error analysis. A scintillating topic, I know, but an interesting factoid nonetheless.

TOOLS: TERMIUM Plus® is now free and available online. Best of all, you can access a searchable version of The Canadian Style through Termium.

DG2010 – Relative cost of research is my long-promised post on the cost of research evaluation indicator. There are also links to the Peer Review Manual and other FAQ files on the revised review process.

Last week I posted that Jo VanEvery has a SSHRC Grant writing guide e-book available on her website.

On Friday, she posted “Embrace the research process” on her blog. The process of research requires a lot of thinking and while it may not seem like you are accomplishing much during the thinking exercise, you are.

So, just as thinking is important and essential to the current functional and long term strategic growth of your research, identifying ways to create fundable projects within your research is critical to the grant writing process. Some funders want to fund projects, while other want to fund programs – and being able to distinguish both within your “big ideas” will help you in the grant writing process.

The NSERC Discovery Program is specifically mandated to fund programs of research. The easiest way to think about it is to consider a project a discrete and short term task within the long term strategic program of research. NSERC’s program description says:

[The] Discovery Grants (DG) Program supports ongoing programs of research (with long-term goals) rather than a single short-term project or collection of projects.

So, in order to fit with NSERC’s requirements, there must be some coherence to your collection of research projects and these projects must lead to some ‘ultimate goal’. The guidelines suggest that you state your objectives early in the proposal. My rule of thumb for distinguishing between goals is that short-term goals are 3-5 year objectives and long-term goals are your career goals 10-15 year goals. Think about what you can reasonably accomplish (in terms of discovery) within the 5 year funding window to set clear and achievable short-term goals. As you move though your research career, your long-term goals will shift as you gain knowledge and experience to enable you to set the bar ever higher.

*Update Oct, 9, 2009* I found this in the revised peer review manual and it might help give more context:

Program versus Project – The Discovery Grants program aims to support a researcher’s ongoing research program, which can comprise a number of well defined projects. The issue of whether the request is for support of a program or a project can be examined in the context of the “Merit of Proposal” criterion when evaluating the “Clarity and Scope of Objectives” (e.g., longterm goals as well as short-term objectives), and the “Significance and Expected Contributions to Research.”

NSERC Program Officers and Evaluation Group Members are in the midst of the annual tour of university campuses across Canada discussing the Discovery Grant Program. If you are applying this year (either as a new or returning applicant) it is especially important that you attend these discussions. Representatives will be describing the new Evaluation Group structures and the delinked funding and proposal ranking process.

To find out the date they are visiting your campus, visit http://www.nserc-crsng.gc.ca/NSERC-CRSNG/Visits-Visites/grants-subventions_eng.asp and scroll down to open the schedule pdf.

If you miss the sessions (or want a refresher on what was said), you can download the 2009 information session presentation pdf (from the previously linked webpage). Of particular importance is slide 20, which hosts a matrix of discovery grants indicators as used by reviewers (in conjunction with the peer review manual) to arrive at a rating for proposals.

I can’t help but wonder if NSERC is going to start publishing what the normal cost of research is for all of the evaluation groups. If someone is consistently ranking high or low on the cost of research indicator and they aren’t told – how will they learn? Maybe there will be some allusion to this in the reviewer feedback.