Intellectual merit

Understand the importance of addressing need, intellectual merit, and broader impacts in a research proposal... 

It is not enough that your proposal targets the needs of a funding agency your proposed idea(s) must also be intellectually sound. Typically, reviewers judge the intellectual merit of a proposal according to three criteria, each of which is described in more detail below ... 

Demonstrate your intellectual merit in a research proposal by emphasizing the three C s. 

Intellectual merit is also based on the credibility of your work plan, including both the proposed research methods and projected timeline. To be credible,... 

By following this two-tiered approach, a less expert reviewer will be able to follow the main ideas of your work, whereas an expert reviewer will be able to judge the intellectual merit of your proposal fully. 

Project Summary. One-page limit, including the names and affiliations of all senior personnel. The project summary must address both the intellectual merit and broader impacts of the proposed CRC project. 

Remember that this move gives you the opportunity to demonstrate your grasp of the research area and establish your intellectual merit as a researcher, two keys to an effective proposal. 

A successful collaboration can also be mentioned as a prior accomplishment. Collaborations strengthen expertise (two heads are better than one) and add to the intellectual merit of a proposal by increasing the likelihood that the work will be completed on schedule. Excerpts 13E and 13F showcase two ways that authors describe collaborative relationships in their proposals. 

The summary should be written in the third person and include a statement of objectives and methods to be employed. It must clearly address in separate statements (within the one-page summary) (1) the intellectual merit of the proposed activity and (2) the... 

With these guidelines in mind, consider an excerpt from Aga s CAREER proposal Project Summary (excerpt 15C). The excerpt summarizes the research component of the proposed work, thereby addressing the intellectual merit of the project. For completeness, the excerpt also includes Aga s broader impacts summary, highlighting the educational components of her work. (Educational impact summaries are not included elsewhere.)... 

Ilya Prigogine, the founding editor of Advances in Chemical Physics, died May 25, 2003. He was born in Moscow, fled Russia with his family in 1921, and, after brief periods in Lithuania and Germany, settled in Belgium, which was his home for 80 years. His many profound contributions to the theory of irreversible processes included extensions of both macroscopic thermodynamic analysis and statistical mechanical analysis of time-dependent processes and the approach to equilibrium. While sometimes controversial, these contributions were uniformly of outstanding intellectual merit and always addressed to the most fundamental issues they earned him international repute and the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1977. Arguably equally important was his creation of a school of theoretical chemical physics centered at the University of Brussels, as well as the mentoring of numerous creative and productive scientists. 

As a consequence of Mode 2 s emergence. Gibbons and colleagues noted that the assessment method by which science was evaluated had to be reconsidered to encounter a new and more interwoven fabric of science that besides intellectual merit had to address questions about the pinpose of its research, the marketability of its results, and the social accountability of its enterprise. In other words. Mode 2 represented a science that, in opposition to that imagined by Robert K. Merton (1942/1973), Vaimevar Bush (1945) and Michael Polanyi (1962/2000), became answerable to society rather than detached from it With Mode 2, the values and ethos of science became more akin to what we understand as engineering. 

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