You may have looked through this book, studied some figures and tables, read the text in part, or even as a whole. I know many of you are now thinking:

You are absolutely right to ask yourself this question. Many candidate writers of career grant proposals have had serious doubts and concerns before they started writing. Here are three quotes collected from a questionnaire that applicants completed the day after submitting their proposals:

Introduction

Since you are reading this book, you are probably eager to “role the dice.” You want to play the game and optimize your chance of winning a career grant. Yes, “winning” is the appropriate term. It’s not like winning a lottery, where all the players have an equal chance of success. No, this is about a race between you and the other applicants, about winning a race in which preparation and devotion, training and support, and some “blood, sweat and tears” really matter. Either you “go for it” with all your energy, creativity, drive, and intellect, or you would be better off doing something else. This may sound rather harsh, but you should realize the competition for such funding is fierce.

You may have your end point of getting a career grant in mind, but where do you start from? You might simply start writing your research proposal straightaway and see where it ends up. And perhaps you will do well – who knows. But if you are serious then you will probably decide to continue reading this book and prepare well, before you start with the actual writing. The factors I see as most essential for your start are:

• Motivation. How much time and energy (if not blood, sweat, and tears) should you be willing to invest to move from start to finish? How serious is all of this? And how serious are you?

• Idea. You need a great idea to surprise, excite, and motivate the panel members and reviewers (and yourself, of course). But how do you get such great ideas?

• Strategy. What can you start doing now to be in the best possible shape and condition by the time the proposal writing ends in submitting an application? Make a strategic plan!

Introduction

Time to go for victory. Time to submit your proposal. No, wait a moment; you should first ask people with experience to criticize and professionalize all your application’s components: from language to utilization, from idea to work plan to budget. Listen carefully to their feedback and attend to all the potential weaknesses, if not flaws, in your proposal. You can be sure that the funding agency will send your proposal out for review to senior peers, collect their critiques, possibly confront you with their points, and then decide on your proposal: go or no-go. And the no-go will hurt, especially if you realize you could have prevented some of the criticism in advance, if only you’d known. So, take time to organize getting feedback before submission and take what is being said seriously, very seriously: use other people’s talents, benefit from whatever coaching, mentoring, and training is available as much as you can!

• Mentoring. Can help from experienced scientists (grant laureates) make the difference? The answer seems to be almost too obvious. Contact potential mentors, even if they appear highly intimidating to you!

• Coaching. Are you an expert on budgets, intellectual property protection, marketing, or other non-scientific tasks? Or do you want to become such an expert? Probably not. So seek some coaching to save time and equally advance the quality of your proposal! But where do you find these people?

• Training. How about training on the job? You simply write, submit, fail, learn, revise, resubmit, and so on. This is an extensive and painful training program! Taking tailored courses may help you speed up the process.

Who is this book for?

This book is for people dreaming of a successful future in science: undergraduate and graduate students, postdocs and young research group leaders. It is also for the people providing support to help make these dreams come true, for example the staff of funding agencies, scientists who review grant applications, or university funding officers, career advisors, counselors, trainers, and mentors.

There is one type of grant that is becoming increasingly important for building a future in science: the career grant. There is perhaps nothing more attractive than being able to carry out plans you have proposed yourself early on in your career. A career grant can provide the funding for starting or consolidating your own research line. It is a unique and favorable feature of career grant programs that you will be competing only with applicants who are at the same career stage as you and not with more experienced people. Once you have been awarded a career grant, you will be much better equipped to apply successfully for other grants, where you will indeed have to compete with scientists from all career stages. Ideas for new projects will spin off from your career grant project and put you in the ideal position to apply for other grants.

Introduction

The funding agency recruits panel members and external reviewers to help them rank the proposals and applicants. This chapter gives insight into the types of instruction that panel members and reviewers may be given by the funding agency. And it lifts the veil covering the evaluation procedure, with all its struggles, caveats, and sometimes difficult decisions. Use all this inside information to your advantage.

• Reviewers. Are the external reviewers given clear instructions by the funding agency? What are the reviewers actually looking for when reading and scoring your proposal? For example, missing or insufficient details would reduce your score and might even make them kill your proposal. Check the lists!

• Rebuttal. The external reviewers may have raised concerns about your leadership, your clever research idea, or the details in your work plan. How should you deal with these when you are asked to write a rebuttal?

• Panel. The panel chair and members are human beings who will, of course, influence each other at the panel meetings. It’s not a bad thing to realize that this human dimension might influence your score either way. How can you get the panel on your side and keep them there?

• Interview. The funding agency may ask you to give a presentation in person and hold a debate with the review panel, to obtain further information on your proposal and to check on your leadership skills. How should you prepare and act? What factors make for a successful presentation?

A journalist from a daily newspaper was one of the teachers at a course on scientific writing. During a break she looked into a thesis overview. (At that time the overview was published separately from the research papers.) She paged through the publication and then said:

Still – about forty years later – in technology, a picture on a thesis cover is seldom seen, nor does one occur often in medicine. However, in biology, it has become the norm.

In biology, an animal studied does not need be camouflaged to be portrayed on the cover. In medicine, the need of disguising a patient studied is a problem. On the next page we have one example of how the problem could be solved – by showing the individual in silhouette (Figure 3.1).

Popularized summary is not used in all universities.

A thesis has three levels of language. The individual papers are written for the specialist, the overview for the non-specialist, and the popularized summary for the layperson. How do you find the level of the layperson? You may imagine a 12-year-old standing behind you, looking over your shoulder while you are writing.

When reading your popularized summary, the layperson first of all wants to know why you were captivated by the subject to such an extent that you were willing to spend four to six of the best years of your life studying it. Of course, what you did and what you found should be presented – but only briefly; this is not the place for lengthy details about your research. The layperson is also interested in the practical applications, i.e. in how treatment of diseases in human beings could benefit from your rat data.

Add elementary illustrations that you yourself may draw, so simple that they might qualify for a place in a children’s book. If you think, “If I do that no one will take me seriously,” then let me tell you that when Peter Englund, Secretary of the Swedish Academy that awards the Nobel Prize for Literature, was writing his thesis, his supervisor said that it was too easily understood: “You will not be taken seriously” (Chukri, 2008).

Although all illustrations in a thesis should have a credit line, pictures without such a line are found far too often. Even with a credit line, the text is often incomplete and even incorrect. For example, if you are to reproduce a figure from another publication, you must obtain permission from both the publisher and the author and then credit the source at the end of your figure legend. The following credit line, i.e. “288,” is inappropriate:

The figure 288 refers to the reference list of the overview where we find an article published by Nature. I emailed the publisher of Nature and asked for a credit line for this particular figure. They sent me this:

This text from Macmillan should have been used as a credit line, instead of reference figure 288.

If you have taken two or more illustrations from the same source, you should repeat the credit line under each figure. If the publisher requires a credit line as lengthy as that of Nature above, the line could be included in the legend of the first figure and the others would say this:

Intensifiers are said to weaken. Consider this:

Instead, try to be specific, as in this example (Rikard Nelander, 2009):

or, like this, about quick revisions (Cristina Book, 2009):

By writing a working abstract at an early stage, you will provide yourself with a framework for the rest of the overview. This will guide you in deciding what to include and what to omit. Then, when you have completed the overview, you can return to the working abstract and recast it in its final form.

Unfortunately, there are those who write the abstract as their final effort, often in a hurry and without opportunity for reflection and revision. A tip: If you are pressed for time, and only then, you can use what you have already written. Take a red pencil and a ruler and underline relevant portions in the various sections; then, combine the underlined sentences into an abstract. The advantage of doing this is that you repeat what you have said previously, without having to use synonyms that can alter your original intention. Some people say that doing so is self-plagiarism. However, the sources from which you are repeating yourself are the very same research papers you are going to include in your bound thesis. These phrases have been formulated as precisely and clearly as you were able, so why should they be changed? Actually, there are journals that require you to compile your abstract in this manner. They have a point.

Also called Research questions, Objectives, Purpose or Scope of the thesis.

Do not use abbreviations here; but if you do, explain them (see Chapter 8, “Abbreviations”).

One concise sentence for each aim is often sufficient. You may present them as bullet points (as here) or in a paragraph of text. Instead of beginning these sentences with synonyms:

1. The aims were:

• to study …

• to investigate …

• to determine …

• to examine …

• to document …

… try, as an umbrella, one of them, and avoid introducing synonyms (Alexey Schramko 2010):

1. The goals were to determine

• the effects of a single dose …

• the mechanisms of …

• the hemodynamic profile …

This book is about the overview of the article-based thesis. It is written for graduate students mainly in the “hard” sciences, such as biology, medicine, and technology. The best time to read this book would be when you are finishing your individual papers.

However, you must find out at an early stage whether your university allows you to use the article-based format. If not, you have to write a traditional monograph thesis. Then, the contents of this book would be helpful to you as well. Listed below are those parts that are also valid for the traditional monograph.

1. Front cover picture

2. Title

3. Abstract

4. Quotations

5. Abbreviations

6. Acknowledgment

7. General introduction

8. Aims

9. General discussion

10. Copyright

To a certain extent, the content of the methods and results sections could also prove beneficial.