Listing grants on one’s CV

Tags

CV, grants, polls

I was going through my semi-regular update of my CV because, frankly, if I don’t I won’t be able to keep track of everything! It’s as much for me as it is for others (and arguably more so these days).

Which got me thinking about grants, and how they’re recorded. On my CV, it’s a combination of year(s), project title, funding source, and grant amount. So far, all the grants that I’ve received have been one of two kinds:

1. a grant / award for which I was the only applicant, like my two postdoc grants
2. a grant where a small group (<5) of us wrote the application and got the funding

These have all been relatively small, bar our work on Northern Rockhopper Penguins, which was funded by the Darwin Initiative to the tune of £200,000, but where each of the five project partners is involved in just about everything. But as I progress, I expect more and more I’ll be just one part of a bigger piece of work. This inevitably leads to the question of how to list those grants.

I clearly didn’t have a hand in writing the whole grant, and would only be participating in a part of it (i.e., there will be funded activities and outcomes to which I know I won’t contribute, just because of the way the project was designed). So it seems disingenuous to list the full value of the grant (which, for these kinds of collaborative projects is likely to be in the £200,000-£1,000,000+ range). But equally, my specific part of the work package was part of the reason the project was funded.

So over to you, dear readers:

 

I’ll tally the results in a week or so.

 

Reviewer to author: acknowledge

Tags

acknowledgements, peer review, polls, writing

Though flawed, the cornerstone of scholarship has always been the peer review.  The cut-and-dry version goes like this: academics research and write a manuscript, and then send it to a journal.  The editor first makes a decision about whether the manuscript is suitable for the journal, and meets some standard.  If it does, s/he will send it to anywhere from 1-4 other experts in the field, who will read it, and provide their comments on the submission back to the editor, who will make a decision and inform the author(s).

Now, let’s look at it from the reviewers’ perspective.  Potential reviewers are contacted by the journal and asked to assess the manuscript.  They can either accept or decline.  If they accept, they have some period of time (generally 3-4 weeks) to provide their review back to the editor.

Obviously, the quality of reviews varies A LOT.  I’ve had reviews that were 5 lines, and others that were 8 pages.  But length alone shouldn’t be an indicator of the quality of a review.

In my experience, I’ve received more good reviews than bad reviews (in terms of their quality, not their decision about whether the journal should accept my manuscript).  And I try to pick out what I like from others’ reviews (techniques, format, etc) and incorporate it into my own style.  I tend to write lengthy reviews, but many of the comments are usually relatively minor, and would take 1-2 minutes to fix (e.g., suggestions to improve readability, grammar, etc).  But the bottom line is that I try to improve the manuscript by giving critical feedback.

Which is why it irks me when I see a manuscript I’ve reviewed (sometimes 2-3 times) finally appear in a journal, but fail to acknowledge the editor or reviewers.  Did they not contribute to the manuscript (though not enough to merit authorship*)?  It’s a simple one-liner in the acknowledgements:

We thank Person A, Person, B, and n anonymous reviewers for improving this manuscript.

Person A and Person B would be people that the authors asked to review the manuscript themselves before submitting (something everyone should do!), or the editor if they provided substantive feedback.

But perhaps this is just because most authors can’t stand my reviews, and purpously snub the reviewers in their acknowledgements by not mentioning them.  So I decided to look at a recent issue of a couple of journals I haven’t reviewed for in the last 2 years: Ecology, Journal of Animal Ecology, and Oecologia, and see what proportion of published articles acknowledged those involved in the review process.

I’ll reveal the results in this week’s Friday Scribbles, so I’d like to know what you estimate:

 

*though I can think of a couple of reviews I’ve done where I contemplated asking, given the amount of time and effort I put in to them!