Research funding from a humanities/social science perspective

Purpose and goal

The project was a subproject of a larger project aimed at promoting cooperation, utilization and innovation in the humanities and social sciences. The goal has been to provide assistance to research funding organizations to reach more researcher from humanities/social sciences that would be relevant to their calls. The project has achieved the goal by providing help for a number of research funding organizations to analyze how they can develop their call processes and by the fact that the work has formed the basis of a digital analysis tool for funders, researchers and advisors.

Expected results and effects

The analyzes made visible several obstacles and opportunities, from how calls are formulated and how funding agencies spread information about them, how experts are recruited and guided in their assessments. Research financiers began to use the results and experience gained from the analyses already during the process. Based on the analyzes, the funders also identified a number of themes that they wanted to work with further, which was done in a follow-up project.

Planned approach and implementation

The sub-project has consisted of a series of workshops where research funding received help from researchers from Humsamverkan to analyze their call processes to see how the call processes can prevent or allow it to researchers in humanities/social sciences to seek funding from the financiers. Based on the analyzes, they identified a number of themes that they wanted to work on, in a next step, which was made in a follow-up project. The themes were: call texts, external communications, experts/assessment teams, call types, final report.