5 tips to securing funding for your postgraduate research

1. Persevere

Image credit: NY Photographic

If you haven’t been able to secure a prestigious Research Council studentship or a scholarship directly from the University to cover your tuition fees and living costs, don’t give up! These awards are extremely competitive so you shouldn’t be disheartened and there are various other ways to partially fund your studies.

2. Think outside the box

There are lots of unconventional funding opportunities out there that you might not have thought about.

For example, have you considered applying for funding from a charity? Check out the Alternative Guide to Postgraduate Funding which is all about funding from the voluntary sector and takes you through the whole process from identifying charities to making a strong application. There will be an opportunity to hear more about alternative sources of funding at our upcoming PGR funding advice event on Wednesday 9 November 2016.

Why should I be interested in Open Access?

So, you may ask, as a PGR why should you be interested in Open Access (OA)?

Well, there are several reasons why OA is relevant and important to researchers, particularly in the early stages of their academic career. Open access in its most simple sense, where research can be accessed without payment barriers allowing anyone to read or download it, offers huge opportunities for researchers to make themselves and their work more widely known.

Big data, small data, no data

There are many aspects to a successful PhD project and challenges to master on your way to graduation. You most certainly are aware that you should acquire e.g. writing and referencing skills, but how much time have you spent thinking about the research data management activities you might need to undertake as part of your research?  None yet? Time to get started with our introduction to research data management!

Bibliometrics for researchers

Have you ever heard the term bibliometrics?  Bibliometrics can be described as a means of measuring the impact of a given publication by looking at the number of times subsequent authors have cited that publication.

How to find an author’s h-index.

Bibliometrics can be applied at various levels, including:

• Author level (e.g. the h-index)
• Article level (e.g. altmetrics)
• Journal level (e.g. impact factor)

There are philosophical questions about the merits of using a citation as a measure of impact.  Ask yourself the question of why you cite papers in your work, is it for positive or negative reasons, are you building on a researchers work, criticising it, or acknowledging their contribution to a field?  Also, citation patterns vary across disciplines, with some areas having numerous co-authors and citing prolifically, and other areas citing fewer papers and having more sole authors.  Nevertheless, bibliometrics are often used as a quantitative measure to determine the impact of researchers, research groups, departments and institutions, although this is often tempered by using peer review alongside them to bring in a qualitative element.

Think Public Engagement!

Regardless of the discipline that you study or your level of experience, there is a responsibility for researchers to ensure that they are engaging public audiences with their research, and today there are more opportunities than ever to get involved.

Public engagement is a phrase that has been pushing its way into the consciousness of UK research since the House of Lords Science and Technology – Third Report in 2000, but it is absolutely not limited to science. HEFCE, RCUK and Vitae are all signed up to a “strategic commitment to public engagement”, so it is clear that public engagement is important to all areas of research.

At its most simplistic, public engagement is a conversation with a public audience about research. The National Co-ordinating Centre for Public Engagement says:

Public engagement describes the myriad of ways in which the activity and benefits of higher education and research can be shared with the public. Engagement is by definition a two-way process, involving interaction and listening, with the goal of generating mutual benefit.