The first step in getting funding is finding the right opportunity. Auburn University subscribes to a number of online resources that can help you find funding opportunities in your field. The best starting point is PIVOT, a comprehensive database of over 25,000 federal and private funding opportunities, updated daily. Talk with your subject librarian about setting up a personalized PIVOT search profile.
In addition to helping you use PIVOT, your subject librarian can collaborate with you on doing custom literature searches in your field to form a complete picture of what's going on and what the research trends are. Publication patterns are another way to surface hot research ideas and potential research partners--at Auburn, at other colleges and universities in the U.S., or overseas. They can also help you avoid wasting time on played-out or marginal areas.
The narrative is the most important part of your grant proposal. Again, our subject librarians can help with the prep work by doing literature reviews in your field of interest to identify research trends, research questions, and potential research partners. Working with our colleagues in PSFS, our librarians can also help you to produce a narrative that is clear, impactful, easy to read, and accessible to stakeholders and decision-makers who may not be experts in your field. Contact your subject librarian early in the drafting process to ensure that you have plenty of time to produce a well-crafted, quality proposal.
If the narrative is the most important part of your proposal, the broader impacts/intellectual merit statement is the most important part of the narrative. Why is your idea important? What is its larger significance? What will it achieve? How will it influence your and other fields? Most importantly, how will it impact society for the better? Again, our subject librarians can help you answer these questions and put your research proposal in a broader interdisciplinary context, thereby increasing your chances of success. Because our subject librarians are used to working together and sharing information as a matter of course, they can also help to surface possible research connections and directions with other fields.
Most federal funding agencies and many private foundations require a Data Management Plan (DMP) as a part of every funding proposal. We can help you turn your DMP from a routine attachment into an eye-catching asset that helps your proposal stand out from the others. The first step is to contact our Research Data Management Librarian for an individual consultation.
Graphs, figures, illustrations, and other visual elements can convey information more efficiently than long textual descriptions. Adding visual elements can increase you proposal's impact and make it stand out from the group. Our Information & Research Commons (I&RC) is staffed by media design specialists who can point you to the right tools and show you how to use them.
"Research Intelligence" means using the full array of research information resources and techniques to help researchers navigate the funding landscape and craft successful proposals. Part of this work is raising your research profile and making yourself more visible to colleagues who may be looking for research partners for themselves--or to program officers at funding agencies who are looking for members of blue-ribbon working groups to identify new research agendas.
Subject librarians and research administrators at Auburn have access to a number of research intelligence resources, including:
Contact us at researchsupport@auburn.edu to take advantage of these and other research intelligence resources.
