Research universities and the federal government partner to foster societal, scientific, and technological advancements, but the federal research grant process is criticized for its procedural inefficiencies. Principal investigators and research administrators lament losing time to bureaucratic regulations, unwieldy processes, and burgeoning…

Many funding agencies require researchers to include a data management plan with their grant applications explaining how they intend to make the data generated from the research publicly accessible. University administration and campus service providers could potentially leverage the content of data management plans to facilitate compliance and…

The purpose of this paper is to describe how a college-level research office has used a variety of services and tools to increase faculty grant activity. A dozen practices will be discussed. Results indicate that the grant dollars received in the most recent fiscal year (FY2019-2020) are almost 150% higher than in the year before these practices…

Research development in higher education is a service-delivery system. In any service field, when choosing appropriate services, practitioners should reach for 'evidence-based practices.' Limited empirical research has addressed the preferences of research faculty regarding research support services. In this project, we sought to provide 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,…

Departmental research administrators offer a wide range of support services to research communities, university central offices, and fellow research administrators in other departments and institutions around the world. It is important for department-level research administration offices to function as a unit to provide centralized services that…

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…

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…

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) established the Building University Infrastructure Leading to Diversity (BUILD) initiative to increase engagement and retention of undergraduates from diverse backgrounds in biomedical research. Portland State University, in partnership with ten other academic institutions, received a BUILD award and…

The purpose of this study was to analyze and develop an in-depth understanding of the characteristics of an R3, predominantly undergraduate institution of higher education with a high-performing externally-funded research portfolio. This study used a qualitative single-bounded case study approach and utilized a focus group structure for the…

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,…

The breadth of doctoral education has expanded to include professional development activities in order to prepare students for academic and nonacademic careers. This mixed methods study focused on students' perceptions of professional development opportunities at a Research One university. The findings suggest that most students feel prepared in…

While Elizabeth Barrett Browning counted 25 ways in which she loves her husband in her poem, "How Do I Love Thee? Let me Count the Ways," we identified only eight ways to evaluate the potential for success of a federal research grant proposal. This may be surprising, as it seems upon initial glance of the review criteria used by various…

Academic careers and institutional reputations are closely linked with the ability to secure funding and publish work. In today's competitive environment, it is essential for research to be clearly communicated. In our experience, many researchers need assistance with communication skills, and institutions that offer professional services in…

The need to understand efficacy and outcomes from grant-funded activity is common to funders, the academic community, and the public. Yet, few articles in the research administration corpus offer details on and considerations of applying the concept of return on investment (ROI) to grant activity. To determine the volume of material available…