By Gerard M Crawley and Eoin O’Sullivan
Imperial College Press
This book is designed as a “how to” guide to writing grant proposals for competitive peer review. Nowadays researchers are often required to apply to funding agencies to secure a budget for their work, but being a good researcher does not necessarily imply being able to write a successful grant proposal. Typically, the additional skills and insights needed are learnt through experience.
This timely book aims to guide researchers through the whole process, from conceiving the initial research idea, defining a project and drafting a proposal, through to the review process and responding to reviewers’ comments. Drawing on their own experience as reviewers in a number of different countries, the authors provide many important tips to help researchers communicate both the quality of their research and their ability to carry it out and manage a grant. The authors illustrate their guidelines with the help of many examples of both successful and unsuccessful grant applications, and emphasise key messages with quotes from reviewers.
The book also contains valuable advice for primary investigators on how to set up their research budget, manage people and lead their project. Two appendices at the end of the volume provide website addresses and references, as well as an outline of how to organise a grant competition.
Aimed primarily at early career researchers applying for their first grant, the book will also be beneficial to more experienced scientists, to the administrators of universities and institutions that support their researchers during the submission process, and to the staff of recently established funding organisations, who may have little experience in organising peer-review competitions.
