When the programmers at the Children’s Hospital Boston Informatics Solutions Group were asked to create a grants database for researchers, they already knew where to start: ask HMS professors about their Facebook-surfing habits.
The goal was simple: build an online tool to give scientists and clinicians fast, easy access to information on federal funding opportunities. If researchers could find relevant grants more quickly, then they could move on to writing the grant applications and, in turn, be able to spend more time on research. This was the idea that Harvard Catalyst, the Harvard Clinical and Translational Science Center, brought to William Crawford, director of the Informatics Solutions Group.
“The folks at Catalyst identified an important problem—research is driven by grants, especially for junior faculty,” said Crawford. “But they face serious logistical problems. We needed an infrastructure that would help researchers deal with the often very complicated process of applying for grants.”
The tool, called Grant Central, was released publicly Sept. 10 on the Harvard Catalyst website. The completed version boasts a searchable collection of more than 1,300 grants compiled from dozens of sources, including the National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, to name a few. Users can also search through a directory of HMS personnel for collaborators and share advice through message boards. Groups of collaborators can create grant proposal “projects” on the site and use them to keep track of files and task lists. Through Grant Central, HMS researchers may well find relief for the most common—if not necessarily the worst—grant-writing headaches that they might encounter.
Ask any scientist what he or she dislikes most about doing research, and you are likely to hear one answer above all else: applying for funding. Although federally funded grants are the lifeblood of their work, many scientists find applying for grants to be an arduous and confusing process. At worst, grant-writing can become a distraction to doing productive research, leading one biologist to complain in a recent PLoS opinion article about the “Kafkaesque” bureaucracy of grant applications.
Harvard Catalyst, a center formed under an NIH program to promote translational research, noticed the problem early on. Besides providing funding directly in the form of pilot grants for clinical and translational research, the center also funds information technology projects designed to foster collaboration among Harvard researchers. The first such project, Profiles, is an advanced personnel directory and social networking tool that debuted on the Harvard Catalyst site earlier this year. Grant Central, which integrates with Profiles, is part of a second wave of enhancements.
It remains to be seen whether the new service will ease grant-writers’ woes as effectively as its creators hope. However, the developers of Grant Central have good reason to be confident that HMS scientists will like the program. In fact, the scientists helped to design it.
For example, one of the first ideas proposed was a feature to automatically generate the “other forms” section of a grant, since this was a common and time-consuming step in the process. It wasn’t clear, however, whether such a complicated feature, or any number of other features like it, would benefit scientists enough to be worth the time for them to learn and use.
To get a more straightforward answer to the question of how to make grant-writing less painful, the developers decided to ask the scientists themselves. In Internet software parlance, they “crowd-sourced” the design process.
Led by Evan Pankey, an MD and research architect, and Jonathan Abbett, interaction designer, the Informatics Solutions Group developers conducted 30 interviews with researchers in the HMS community, asking them in detail about their grant-application experiences.
“We focused our attention on junior faculty and postdocs because early-career scientists are the ones dealing with grant applications the most,” said Pankey. “It turns out that even these groups differ a lot in what they need.”
Whereas junior faculty, such as associate professors, reported feeling overwhelmed by the administrative details of grant applications, postdoctoral fellows seem less preoccupied with the grants themselves than with getting general advice about the grant application process, observed the developers.
More important, they learned what scientists did not need. Features to keep track of forms or to write the grants directly aren’t very helpful.
“We eventually concentrated our effort on three facets of a single social networking problem,” said Crawford. “Given people’s research interests, how do we connect them to the grants, collaborators and advice that they’ll need?”
In addition to the interviews, Pankey and his team also distributed an online survey to Harvard researchers (of whom more than 400 responded) with broader questions about their computer and Internet usage, including specific questions about tools like RSS readers or social networking services like Facebook and LinkedIn.
“We wanted to find out how much scientists were actually using online tools to help their research in real life,” said Pankey. “It’s not as much as we thought.”
Less than half of the HMS researchers surveyed used Facebook, and of those who did, the majority were postdocs rather than faculty. Some senior scientists had never even heard of the site, and most researchers regardless of experience level were simply too busy with work to be social networking online.
Uptake of other online networks, even those specifically geared toward scientists, was also negligible. Blogs were popular among the researchers, but not read in a systematic way, as with a tool such as an RSS reader. Twitter, the so-called “micro-blogging” platform, was virtually unheard of.
Of course, there are individual exceptions, and as a whole, scientific networking sites have never thrived more. ResearchGATE, a professional networking and literature-sharing website founded by Massachusetts General Hospital radiology fellow and MD–PhD Ijad Madisch, recently added its 140,000th member, the most of any scientific network.
Of all the websites that the Grant Central developers asked their survey respondents about, there was one notable outlier: Craigslist.
“Everybody seemed to have used Craigslist outside of research,” said Pankey, referring to the popular online classifieds website. “Our researchers wanted a way to advertise their availability to work on projects or find collaborators with a specific skill set, so we incorporated that into the final product.”
The feature, called “skill finder,” should be familiar to any scientist who has ever used a classified ad. The developers hope it will become a new way for scientists to seek out collaborators and team members.
The findings from Grant Central’s development process will be presented at the American Informatics Association annual symposium in November. The developers of the Informatics Solutions Group say they are looking for more projects on which to apply their methods.
Grant Central can be found online at http://grants.catalyst.harvard.edu/.
