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Research Skills I. - How to write research grant proposals

Any PhD student shall know how to prepare and submit proposals for research grants. First, he or she may be supposed to submit such proposal during his PhD studies (e.g. IGA grant, specific research grant scheme, application for a research stay abroad), successful PhD graduate may be destined for an academic career where applying for grants is part and parcel of employment survival, third, even if you graduate and pursue other career options, grant application is a skill that can be generally exploited in various other situations. For example, writing grant application is structurally similar and has comparable aims as preparing any project proposal for example in private companies.

Objectives of the course

This course has one objective: to teach you how to write proposals for academic grant, test it in practice and receive the necessary feedback.

Please bear in mind that there are various grant schemes that obviously have very different requirements and objectives, still any grant application basically share the same structure and logic, generally consisting of the following parts:

- identification of the knowledge gap (based on the state of the art /literature review)

- explanation how you "solve" the knowledge gap (aims of the project, research design)

- methodology used in your project

- outputs of the project (publication strategy)

- societal impact of the project

- financing (budget)

- project team (investigators)

In this course, we will explore these parts and their logic and test it in practice.

How will the course proceed (and requirements)

1) Please go through the readings recommended below and learn as much from them as possible. 

2) Attached are two real grant proposals that were submitted in the past (for Czech Grant Agency). Please read them (Klíma from p. 9, Zbíral from p. 12) and prepare a home assignment that would meet the following criteria: asses which project you find more persuasive. Also, identify three weaknesses that each of the projects suffers - please elaborate your choices. Overall the home assignment shall not be longer than 500 words and will be submitted through email (robert.zbiral@law.muni.cz) by 1st December 2021.

3) We will have an online session (we will agree on a date and time once you submit the home assignment from point no. 2) in which I will sum up some recommendations for writing projects and provide you with feedback for the home assignments.

4) We will see how the preceding steps would go but in the end I would like to let you write a real (but of course mock) short grant proposal (probably for IGA grant) -  we will discuss this opportunity during the online session.

5) You will receive credits for fulfilling all home assignments and participation in the online session. 

Recommended readings

There are dozens of "how to apply for grants" guides freely available on the internet, often linked to the concrete grant scheme in which you may apply. You are of course free to get the basic or even advanced knowledge from these guides or websites.

Apart from that, please read (skim) the following sources:

GORSEWSKI, E. Writing Successful Grant Proposals. Rotterdam: Sense, 2016.

- here I recommend to read the whole (short) book

- choose any chapter you find useful, chapter 8 (Common mistakes...) is in my view especially helpful

10 common grant writing mistakes (from Fordham University)

- again it is useful to read the whole short document