Points for assessment

When preparing your application you should take into account the following general points of assessment. Assessors will take these points into account when looking at all applications.

• Quality of research
• Quality of the proposal
• Track record of researchers

Quality of the research

Will your project facilitate:

• an important discovery or innovation
• the solution to an important practical problem
• a significant conceptual advance

Quality of the proposal

Make sure your proposal is reader-friendly.

If you don’t put in the effort to make your research proposal easy to read you are relying on your assessors doing the required work to understand your proposal.

• Presentation should be clear and uncluttered
• Structure information for several levels of reading
• Use language appropriate to readers levels of knowledge
• Make it interesting – express your enthusiasm and make it active, exciting and lively
• Emphasise the innovation and significance
• Illustrate why it is being done, give a clear research plan and what the relevant benefits are
• If there is an identifiable weakness or difficulty raise the problem and neutralise it by responding to it
• Obstacles can be indicators of innovation, challenges that need tackling – where possible set up your proposal to achieve this problem solving
• Images, diagrams, graphs and tables need to be legible and effective

Track record of the researchers

• Demonstrate you have the skills and experience to carry out the project
• Expertise of your team is obvious – the experience level is appropriate for the project
• Give clear statements of achievements
• Include most relevant publications, reports and other contributions
• Emphasise recent research activities and achievements