Lakehead University Grant Workshop

Written & Unwritten Rules for Research Grants

The column that I write for University Affairs is called “Ask Dr. Editor.”

Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion in the Post-Secondary Research System is a report published by the Council of Canadian Academies in October 2024 (and it’s the source of Table 5.1, “EDI considerations in select federal grant programs”)

I quoted from this article: Boudreau, K. J., Guinan, E. C., Lakhani, K. R., & Riedl, C. (2016). Looking across and looking beyond the knowledge frontier: Intellectual distance, novelty, and resource allocation in science. Management science, 62(10), 2765-2783. https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2015.2285

My unwritten rules are:

1. Know what your results will be before you propose the project
2. Your scholarly outcomes and impacts are primary (knowledge, methods & theory)
3. The peripheral pieces are central to a successful grant

You can find additional unwritten rules in the form of quotations from peer reviewers by downloading the four PDFs that I’ve linked to at the bottom of this page.

“Ask Dr. Editor” pieces with grant-specific advice:

• Editing strategies: “Emphasize this: structuring highly readable sentences and paragraphs”; “Clarify this: structuring highly readable lists”; “A quick shave for your grant proposal: cutting your word count in page-limited texts”; “How to integrate storytelling into your next research grant application”; “Using the active voice strategically”; “Simple tricks to add clarity in complex sentences”; “Reducing the weight of your words”; “Writing well is hard: how to write like the best writers in your discipline”
• Impact & influence: “Demonstrating impact in your tenure dossier” (lists tools that you can use to show diverse impact); “Telling your research story with numbers: impact metrics for the humanities” (again, tools that attest to impact); “Against utility and instrumentalization: knowledge mobilization for the humanities”
• Training plan & teaching statement: “How to articulate your training plan in funding applications”; “How to incorporate equity, diversity, and inclusion in your grant applications”; “Three tips for crafting a great teaching philosophy statement”; “How to write a statement of teaching philosophy that shines”
• Budget & budget justification: “Your grant budget is a mess!”; “Drafting the budget for your first SSHRC grant application” (this three-part structure applies to any budget justification, not just SSHRC)
• Figures & images: “Three ways to use colour effectively in grant applications”; “Quick, yet polished visuals for grant applications”; “Quick yet polished timelines for grant applications”
• Other specific components of a grant: “How to write a narrative CV”; “Drafting compelling letters of support for research grant funding” (for any partner letters, likely not for IG, IDG, or Discovery); “How to write clear objectives for your research grant proposal”; “On internal alignment: objectives, outcomes, outputs, and contributions in CIHR Project grant applications” (also relevant for SSHRC and NSERC)
• Funders beyond Tri-Agency: “Becoming an academic-artist: how to apply for your first artist’s grant”; “Preventing budget overruns for your CFI Innovation Fund request”; “Submit with confidence: CFI Innovation Fund best practices”
• Other relevant pieces: “Your reader is a little bit drunk”; “Making ambitious research look feasible”; “How to show your project’s worth in social science and humanities research proposals”; “Getting “is” right”

Peer Review of Grants & Implications for Grant Writers

1. SSHRC

SSHRC Manual for Merit Review Committee Members | the real meat begins about half-way down, with the section “Before the merit review committee meeting”

Merit Review Committees is where you can find the list of last year’s peer reviewers

SSHRC’s Award Search Engine can enable you to locate successful applicants from your institution, region, or professional association, whom you can then approach to ask if they’d be willing to give you guidance on which committee or committees they have submitted to previously, and their impressions of the cultures of those committees.

• Figure out what committee to apply to by Googling last year’s peer reviewers.
• Applications that assume specialized knowledge are hard for reviewers to champion
• Write your summary and first page as if they might be scanned during the committee meeting
• Cite works that your reviewers might remember from their comprehensive exams
• In our competitive funding environment, clear writing gives your application an edge. Err towards short sentences, cut ‘is’, and balance abstract language with illustrative examples.

2. NSERC

NSERC’s List of Evaluation Groups and Research Topics can help you to find the best committee to apply to based on assigned research topics

Refer to NSERC’s Review Committees page to, wildly, learn who is going to be on the peer review committee for the 2025 competition; it is surprising that they (appear to) be telling us who will review the upcoming competition, because conventionally you only hear the names of committee members after the competition closes

The NSERC Peer Review Manual for the Discovery competition; I recommend reading Section 3 (pp. 11-16), Section 4 (pp. 16-33), and Appendix 5 (pp. 46-47).

• Write for a breadth of expertise, especially in the methods section.
• Articulate precisely in your summary what your discovery will be and why it matters for the field.
• Perfect your CCV (if applying to Discovery in 2025). Draft your narrative CV this summer (if applying to Discovery in 2026 or later). – Letitia’s guidance for the narrative CV is here
• In our competitive funding environment, clear writing gives your application an edge. Err towards short sentences, cut ‘is’, and balance abstract language with illustrative examples.

Afternoon Workshop

The book I referenced is: Lang, J. M. (2021). Small teaching: Everyday lessons from the science of learning. John Wiley & Sons.

1. Objectives:

• Your objectives need to together fit into and support a single overarching goal
• Your objectives are what you want to achieve but not how, so leave the methods out of your objectives
• One objective is about the size and scope of a journal article
• It should be possible to complete your objective, which means it’s not ideal to have an objective start with “explore,” “examine,” “understand,” “investigate” (because you could spend a lifetime investigating your topic!)
• Avoid the domino effect; don’t make one objective dependent on another
• Number your objectives and give them a keyword, to help peer reviewers remember them
• Don’t make student training or knowledge mobilization into their own objectives, because those should be integrated into and throughout your project as a whole

2. Methodology:

• Detail every step you will take
• Justify your chosen approach and the components within it (e.g. sample size)
• Provide evidence that you’ve done this method before (or that someone on your team has)
• Articulate which objectives will be achieved by the end of a particular stage or phase of research
• Anticipate and address reviewers’ concerns
• EDI belongs in the methods section

3. Student Training Plan

• Build on a foundation ofexisting experience (i.e., tell us what you’ve done before with respect to training, and keep your current plan in line with what you’ve done previously)
• Use structure to make this sectioneach to quickly scan & understand
• EDI belongs in the HQP training section

4. Knowledge Mobilization Plan / Most Significant Contributions

• Build on a foundation of existing experience (i.e., don’t say you’re going to start podcasting if you have never podcasted before)
• SSHRC: Your KMb Plan should feel like a logical, natural extension of your methods
• NSERC: Your anticipated impacts feel like a logical, natural extension of your most significant contributions
• Go with quality over quantity | here, I referred to the Deakin University Library Research Metrics Toolkit, but I definitely also recommend two articles that I’ve written: “Demonstrating impact in your tenure dossier” (lists tools that you can use to show diverse impact); “Telling your research story with numbers: impact metrics for the humanities” (again, tools that attest to impact)
• Integrate end-users in the research process itself

Mock evaluation:

Download the SSHRC evaluation 2-page PDF, the NSERC grid, or the NSERC Discovery Grants Rating Form

Let me email you these PDFs:

• Until they are formally published through University Affairs, please treat these documents as if they are embargoed. I published my summary of the NFRF Peer Reviewers’ Perspective doc in my January 2025 piece for my column. My summaries and the PDFs for SSHRC, CIHR, and NSERC will be published in my column in May, June, and July respectively.
• I was fortunate to be able to receive funding to hire three UBC graduate student interns to support this project: Andrea Kampen, Olivia Brophy, and Athena Pallas.
• Because I’m hoping to update these documents when I’ve done more interviews, I’ve asked for your email address. This approach means that I can email you with updated or new documents when they are available. Because I want to keep these docs up-to-date, I ask you to not circulate the PDFs at all; instead, please direct your colleagues to my column, where I’ll publish the URL that folks can use to get an email with the doc they’re interested in.

Becoming a Better Editor of Your Own Work:

I’m teaching an 8-week synchronous course called “Becoming a Better Editor of Your Own Work,” and it starts this week. I only offer this course once a year, and it comes with a expert coach who provides you with tailored feedback on your writing. You’re welcome to join us.