Assessment Criteria for Early Career Researcher's Proposals in the Humanities

Abstract

Competitive research grants become more and more important in the careers of young scholars. If grants are making careers, the decision for the grant winners is important and needs to be fair, consistent and transparent. In this research in progress paper, we present evaluation criteria for research proposals from early career researchers in the humanities. We apply a bottom-up procedure to identify evaluation criteria that reach consensus among the humanities scholars themselves. We identified 23 aspects pertaining to 9 criteria for the assessment of research proposals. There are no differences between the selection of aspects that reach consensus among the scholars regarding whether the applicant is a doctoral student or a postdoc, nor did we find differences in the selection of aspects between disciplines. We found slight differences in the ratings between tenured and non-tenured scholars and between women and men. Tenured scholars and women each emphasized an additional aspect.