Research Funding Bodies Editing and Proofreading Services

A call attracts four hundred applications and funds twenty-two. Somewhere between a hundred and fifty and two hundred of those applications were outside the call's remit — not weak, just not what the funder was asking for — and every one of them represents about three weeks of a researcher's life and a reviewer's time. The remit was stated. It was stated in a way that excluded almost nothing.

We edit what research funders produce — call documents and their scope statements, remit and eligibility criteria, assessment criteria and their weighting, guidance for applicants and reviewers, panel and peer review process documentation, feedback frameworks for unsuccessful applications, terms and conditions of award, reporting and monitoring requirements, strategy and priority documents, and communications about funding decisions and outcomes. Our editors work on the call document that determines who applies.

The call's scope statement is where a funder either targets its money or generates work for the whole system, and its failure is describing a priority rather than a boundary. A call inviting proposals that address the challenges of an ageing society will receive everything anybody is already doing, relabelled. We work through these so the scope states what is in remit and, at equal length, what is out — the disciplines, the study types, the stages of research, the topics that look adjacent and are not — since exclusions are what applicants actually need and funders are reluctant to write them; so borderline cases are addressed with examples, because every applicant believes their work is central and a worked example of something plausibly related but out of scope saves fifty applications; so the assessment criteria are published with their weights, given that a call weighting feasibility at forty per cent attracts different proposals from one weighting novelty at forty; so what the panel is instructed to reward is stated, particularly where it differs from the obvious reading — that a smaller well-scoped project will beat an ambitious one, or the reverse; so the eligibility rules are stated as tests an applicant can apply to themselves rather than as categories; so anything the funder has funded before under this heading is cited, since applicants calibrate from awarded projects better than from any description; and so the call says what it will not fund even if excellent. Calls written this way get fewer applications and better ones.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including call documents, strategy material and review processes. We are editors rather than research funding or policy advisers, and we offer no view on remit, criteria or funding decisions. What we can do is make the boundary as clear as the priority.