This study investigates the potential of European universities as hosts for Marie Sklodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) grantees. Factors explaining both the probability of a university hosting an MSCA grantee and its extent are estimated using a zero-inflated negative binomial regression model. Results reveal that the probability of hosting MSCA…

With current constraints of public funding of research the question of principal investigator (PI) success has gained prominence. Yet understanding grant success remains problematic. While often associated with peer acceptance of the proposal text, research fundability in large part is informed by PI participation in the social systems of research…

Neoliberalism has become a highly dominating and taken-for-granted way of organising the university sector around the world. In the critical educational literature, this market-based rationality has been scrutinised in detail over the past decades. However, rather scant attention has been directed to how university managers and administrators,…

Much of the literature on grant writing does not explicitly identify the skills needed to be an accomplished grant writer, or how these skills are acquired. This paper reviews literature on grant writing and argues the need to identify key grant writing skills to improve the quality of grant applications. The ability to persuade, to weave a clear…

An award as principal investigator (PI) is an aspiration for many post-PhD researchers. However, we know little of the actual journey from PhD graduation to achieving this goal. Using a qualitative narrative approach, this study explored how eight science, technology, engineering, mathematics and medicine post-PhD researchers (on contracts and…

This paper aims to investigate early career researchers' (ECR) needs and barriers in conducting research at Kazakhstani regional universities employing a mixed methods research design with the collection of both quantitative and qualitative data. We surveyed one hundred and twenty university academic staff undertaking the first stages of their…

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…

Each application to the National Science Foundation (NSF) must contain a Broader Impact (BI) strategy. Similarly, grant applications for most research funders in Canada and the UK require strategies to support the translation of research into impacts on society; however, the guidance provided to researchers is too general to inform the specific…

Brian Martin describes a difficult committee meeting he once attended which consisted of one representative from each department. When the meeting ended it left a bitter taste for many who participated. Having learned from this experience, Martin became a chair of the committee and tried a new system that overcame many of the previous problems.…

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…

This study demonstrates the use of metaphor analysis in needs assessment for developmental support and shows how it can be used to critically examine assumptions in the literature about the ways emerging researchers conceptualize their career trajectory. We investigated the professional development needs of a group of science, technology,…

Librarians and information specialists' involvement during the development of grant applications for external funding can save researchers' time, provide specialist support, and contribute to reducing avoidable waste in research. This article presents a survey of information specialists working for the National Institute for Health Research's…

The future of education research is linked to what early career researchers in Education are doing and learning to do now. This paper presents a narrative of one early career researcher who works and lives in Australia. She tells the story about how she came to research and to an academic life, about what her doctoral work and education taught her…

What does it all mean for universities as research institutions when the external funding acquired by their academics, already stretched intellectually and time poor, is going to those who simply do not have the time to carry out the proposed research, i.e. to the academics themselves? That is, how can a full-time teaching and research academic…

This paper illustrates how a university-based project management office (PMO) can provide focused support across the entire grant project lifecycle within a European research context. In recent years, EU (European Union) research and innovation grant programs have increasingly shifted to support multidisciplinary consortia composed of industry,…