Abstract
It is a well-known fact that the most appealing external funding for a project is grant funding. Therefore, evaluation of research proposal task needs an elaborate approach so as not to finance inconvenient projects. It is indispensable to establish a detailed study for submitted research proposals to have a clearer picture of the grant funding candidates. This study has contributed to research proposal evaluation using a multicriteria approach based on interval-valued intuitionistic fuzzy sets. An interval-valued intuitionistic fuzzy preference relation matrix is initially constructed to determine the relative importance of criteria based on pairwise comparisons in the presence of insufficient information about the criteria. The proposed evaluation method for grand funding allocation problem is composed of six main criteria and 24 sub-criteria. A sensitivity analysis is applied to see the robustness of the decision made.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 1203-1218 |
| Number of pages | 16 |
| Journal | Soft Computing |
| Volume | 21 |
| Issue number | 5 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 1 Mar 2017 |
Bibliographical note
Publisher Copyright:© 2015, Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.
Funding
There is a plenty of financial instruments for a proposed research in the funding world. It is possible to describe them as equity investments, grants, award schemes, loans etc. Most preferred financial tool is called grants (Chapin ). A grant is the best way to promote a project. Researchers prefer this type of fund because there is no interest to be paid and funds are generally non-returnable. However, every finance provider has its own research priorities and it is vital for one who requests the grant. Researchers have to read the “scope” of the funding and the goal of the organization that supports grant. It is a fact that economic growth depends on technological innovation for many researchers. A researcher who has a project demands any kind of financial support by preparing a research proposal. The research proposal that has a value to work on the chosen scientific area is an explanatory document (Chapin ; Geuna and Martin ). Simply, a research proposal demonstrates and justifies a research idea (Punch ). It should include the practical ways of solving problem. A research proposal exposes current situation of the problem applying different analyzing techniques. After examining the existing literature on a specific topic, a researcher describes his/her own idea for a new project. A research proposal should explain three issues; definition of problem, importance of research, and the road map of the projects. Most part of a research proposal is devoted to financial support (Jacob and Lefgren ). There are different ways of supporting a research financially. Loans, equity investments, award schemes and grants are some of finance support mechanisms (Bloch et al. ). However, demand for funding is very high and researchers have to compete each other’s (Lichtenberg ). One way of funding is a grant which is a considerable approach to get a project off (Ward ). A grant is known as the best source of funding among researchers. Grant fund has some advantages in comparison to other financial instruments. Usually, there is no interest to be paid for a grant and it is generally non-returnable. A researcher accepts grant as free money, but obtaining a grant in most cases is difficult. Deserving a grant needs a considerable amount of effort and time. Figure shows the subject areas of grant funding. The first six subject areas of grant funding are medicine, social sciences, multidisciplinary, biochemistry, genetics and molecular biology, energy, and nursing. Financial decision process for project evaluation is considered as the core act according to funders. Most of funding mechanisms do not support grants simply for just a good proposal preparation. It is essential that a research proposal has to be well prepared to obtain grant funding from the funder’s viewpoint (Ward ). Proposed projects should satisfy project evaluation team’s checklist or criteria (Hills and Dale ). They usually ask for evidence of relevant research and forward planning in accordance with the amount of money being requested, proposed production layout, the type of work and time scheduling. Project evaluation group judges different criteria to accept a research proposal. They also consider a number of measurable outputs for monitoring project to judge whether a group/project is really making a difference. Research proposal evaluation process has utmost importance for assigning grand funding. To appraise the reliability of a research proposal for grant review, PEG compared scores of research proposals using the proposed methodology. It is important to know that the main interest of funders is the reliability of evaluation procedure. Another main issue of funders is to make a long-term difference to the lives of people living in state. They want researchers to spend provided financial support wisely. There are different types of funding besides grant fund (universities, research charities, or private fund) and all funders have objectives to fulfill set by the organizations or people.
Keywords
- Fuzzy logic
- Grant funding
- Interval-valued intuitionistic fuzzy sets
- Project evaluation group (PEG)
- Research proposal