As you said, luck is important. People are now considering or investigating a lottery system for grant selection. Just yesterday I have read a paper on plos biology about it, here is the link:
https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/a ... io.3000065
Bren wrote: ↑Sun Jan 13, 2019 1:14 pmExcellent response, thank you!
Just on point 2: I am guilty of some 'blanket thinking' on this point, I admit. I had the experience a few months ago of being told that two people I know are expert evaluators for MCSA (not in my discipline) and my response was something like "You are shitting me, those idiots can just about tie their shoe laces". I'm sure there are some excellent people involved.
megasphaera@yahoo.it wrote: ↑Sun Jan 13, 2019 1:01 pmThanks for raising this.
Regarding your first point: that is a major problem in academia, it has been like this forever and is something that journal are trying to address by making the authors of a paper in review anonymous. In academia there is a lot of competition and if you don't like someone or you are working in the same field and get the chance to review one of this person's paper, well it is easy to imagine what will happen. Again we are trying to advance human knowledge, so personal beliefs, ideology and what you like/dislike should stay at home. In biomedicine and in each specific topic, we all know the big names or what your competitors are doing so even if your name isn't there, it is quite easy to guess and penalize a paper/application if you are an asshole!
2) Usually, you apply for a MSCA after your PhD or few years postdoc so most of the times, someone which has few years of experience more than you, will evaluate your proposal (i guess). I have some colleagues working as experts (senior postdocs and young PIs) and have considerably more experience than me (i have been working in my field for 6 years and have one postdoc experience), and I deeply believe in their integrity and objectivity when evaluating proposals. Of course, I cannot speak for all the thousand experts for the IF . If i am not wrong if you are awarded a MSCA-IF they invite you to evaluate next year proposals. I have heard this from someone and i could be completely wrong. In this case it would be a young postdoc with very few experience in project evaluation, hence the case you are considering. As you said, I don't think that a senior PI or a professor will sign as an expert, unless is invited.
3) The trend and how "hot" is your topic is something major in the life sciences and biomedicine as well, but is based purely on the science you are doing and what everyone else is doing, so i would say this is normal in the LIF.
In my case, I never took it personally, this is how things works in academia, and i have faced rejection multiple times before and i will face it many times in the future. As i said before, resilience is essential in academia and in my opinion is what differentiate a successful scientist from the rest!
Bren wrote: ↑Sun Jan 13, 2019 12:36 pmI decided to apply for this funding 4 days before the deadline, and, in fact, knew little about MCSA before that. I've only been in academic for few years, after working in the non academic sector for 15 years.
When I looked into this fellowship 3 things struck me: 1) That applications are not anonymous. I think it would be awkward to anonymise applications but I think it could be done, and should be done. There are 'big names', superstar academics in all of our disciplines, and proposals linked of those names will, I believe, be look upon favorably by evaluators. This is a problem.
2) The second thing that struck me (once I had spoken to colleagues), and this has been raised by others on this forum, is that evaluators can hardly be called 'experts' as a lot of them are junior academics and postdocs. So, as a former drug addict who has spent 15 years working with drug addicts after I cleaned ups, and has 3 degrees, a phd, and a rake of publications, my proposal on the psychology of addiction recovery will be evaluated by a young postdoc who is understandably trying to supplement his or her income. Senior academics don't work as experts cos they dont need the dough.
3) Issues, especially social and political issues, go through trends of 'popularity' (popularity isn't the right word, but hey you get my meaning). Proposals relating to immigration, refugees, racism, radicalization etc will be far more likely to get funding than proposals relating to equally important and pressing problems such as addiction, organised crime, sex crime etc (I'm a criminologist, hence the focus on crime). I'm sure this trend of 'in vogue' issues is present in other fields too.
My point here is that, similar to the point with the political ideology, one could make an argument that there is a lot of arbitrariness in the scoring of these proposals, a lot will depend on the luck of the draw and the integrity and intelligence of evaluators. Therefore, man we really shouldn't take it too personally if we don't get selected, so much is about luck, luck, luck. I aint gonna stress, and I aint gonna take it personally if I dont get it. Theres a lot of dice rolling involved here.