Developing A Research Project

13 Aug 2023 - Fund_seeker

The genesis of a research project

One of the roles of the researcher is to produce research proposals. A research proposal is usually a document presenting a new research project that a researcher is presenting to a funding body with the goal of obtaining financial support for their scientific investigation.

Part I: Top down research

It has become very common that a country interested in boosting its research output will create organisations dedicated to establishing research priorities and allocating funds. For example in the UK, there is a public body called UKRI that directs research and innovation funding and conducts assessments of its funding beneficiaries through a process called REF (Research Excellence Framework). UKRI comprises 7 research councils that each have a set budget to allocate to their specific areas of interest. In this context it is interesting to consider the implications of such a method of funding allocation.

Note: As for many things in life, it is often easier to complain about the things that don’t work than it is to look at the positive side. In this first article on the topic, I will focus mostly on exposing the negative consequences of top down funded research, which does not mean there aren’t advantages to this. Subsequent posts will look at the positive side and alternative models.

How is a research project born and developed in a context where funding is administered in a top down fashion? Let’s take for example a researcher in a public UK research institution. Their typical approach will be to remain up to date with various calls for proposals from several funding bodies around their research topics. With the submission deadlines in mind, the researcher will put together a research proposal that fits the big themes emphasised by the funding bodies and that will hopefully look attractive enough to the panel of experts in charge of reviewing applications. The review process is designed to be as fair as possible, although there are always anecdotal accounts of politics interfering with the normal process of decision making. Lately, calls for proposals have also come with templates for the applicants to follow with sections not related directly to the activities of research but to adjacent things such as outreach, impact on the society at large or exploitation plans (whether this should be the case or not is up for debate).

In this context, The exercise of writing a research proposal can roughly be one of three things.

  1. You already have a research project that you have been developing for a while and luckily it falls within the themes proposed. In this case, you can focus your efforts in demonstrating that you have the means to deliver on this project and in evidencing why you need funding to overcome a specific hurdle. Additionally, you must show that given your rich expertise, you are well suited to conduct this work.
  2. The theme doesn’t apply directly to your research interests but you are in need of funding to develop something that you deem important enough to want to spend a consequent amount of your time working on it. In this case the exercise is more artistic because you must find a way to elegantly fit the call for proposal to your research project.
  3. In this case, all you need is money, you are desperate for it and often, it is because your job security depends on it. What you do in this case is use your imagination, the scientific literature, the reputation of your institution, the keywords in the call for proposal, your network as project partners, anything works as long as it increases your chances of getting the money. With all that you can propose a completely new research avenue that fits the call for proposals. Unfortunately, this is often the case that applies.

The first case is probably the one every researcher dreams of finding themselves into. This is the case where the proposal almost writes itself, you understand the field, you know intimately what the critical issues are and can formulate an honest plan to overcome them. You shouldn’t struggle to support your expertise and you are in a position to evidence your proposed project with preliminary or partial results from your existing work. This is a proposal that exists in the continuity of your ongoing activities and might add a few innovative steps or even very hard challenges but the direction and reward is more or less clear.

The second case is what I refer to as the semi artistic case also called trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. This is where the research you are doing isn’t directly related to the theme of the call for proposal so you add fluff and colours to it to make it look close enough. It is research after all, so insights from one field might find applications in another one, if one only takes the time to look. You still do need to sound convincing, luckily this approach is not only used to trick the selection panel as there might genuinely be cross pollination of fields and often breakthroughs come from multi-disciplinary approaches. There you have it, your plausible deniability.

The third case is what happens more often than researchers will admit. There is pressure to bring funding into the department therefore researchers are made to turn into novelists. The entire exercise becomes a challenge to tell a good story and check all the boxes of the call for proposal whatever the means. You will invent a research project out of thin air, maybe helped with your expertise and then convince yourself that it has merits beyond obtaining funds so you can better defend it. You can also imagine all the benefits that society will gain from your breakthroughs and all the ways in which you will perform outreach activities. If in addition to this you can add letters of support from a few companies within your network then it goes a long way to show the strength of the proposal. Again, it is a research project so nobody can blame you for being overly optimistic.

So what ?

An obvious flaw in this top down approach to research funding is that - as in the prevalent case 3 - researchers might be led to consider research avenues not for their personal convictions about what is important/interesting to investigate but to blindly follow the source of funds wherever it takes them, thus silencing their own expertise to the benefit of those who decide budget allocations.

So is this good or bad?

Well, It depends on the context. In a commercial context it does make sense that an entity whose purpose is economic returns would identify what areas give it an edge and therefore push resources there to hopefully unlock many riches. Of course Governments’ obsession with GDP growth does also put them in this context but wouldn’t it be more efficient to leave this type of hands on approach to private entities? The reason being that the concept of opportunity-cost seems to apply better to a company that is driven by private profit/loss and therefore more able and incentivised to focus the efforts of its researchers to activities that will reap profits. An obvious question that might come to your mind as you are reading this is, how do we then incentivise research into big challenges that might not have an obvious financial return but still a tangible impact on our quality of life? We will touch on this in the “positives” of top down research funding but an element of response is that researchers are also people and as such they also do care about their quality of life and so do not require a mandate to be interested in making it better. Moreover, there needs to exist research institutions from which the research can be trusted by the taxpayers as not being biassed by the judgement of any central party despite the political preferences of the time. Should government funding for research exist? Yes, though, my personal conviction is that it should directly fund research institutions which themselves will fund researchers and give them the means to freely explore topics they themselves deem important, leaving open (or incentivising) the possibility of collaboration with private entities to further fund results that bear an interesting commercial potential. In this way, there will not be a preselection of winning and losing ideas by the funding bodies to the detriment of other potential breakthroughs. And even though the selection panels for funding allocation are made of experts, let’s remember that paradigm shifts in science often happen in spite of the current established experts, not because of them.