Tips for Writing Good Proposals for HFIR and SNS
- Contact instrument staff before writing and ask them about opportunities for collaboration. Staff are available to:
- Provide details about our equipment and capabilities, including availability or subscription.
- Help confirm the feasibility of your approach.
- Help estimate and justify the amount of facility time you are requesting.
- Help address why this specific facility is the best choice to meet your requirements.
- Provide constructive comments on your statement of research.
- Include background information on why the proposed experiment is important.
- Include a precisely defined objective; don't combine loosely related experiments in a single proposal.
- Clearly articulate the science case: state the problem and its importance.
- Place your research plan in the context of what others are doing. Include references to literature where appropriate.
- Describe what is particularly innovative about your strategy to address the problem. State why the proposal is timely.
- Address how the experiment will make a difference. Focus on how this particular effort will contribute to the field. Describe the proposed work including samples, methods, and procedures.
- State clearly and exactly what you are going to synthesize, measure, or calculate.
- Describe how your sample(s) have been characterized by other methods to ensure phase purity, crystal quality, or specific intrinsic behavior.
- Provide sufficient detail to demonstrate that you have thought carefully about your plan.
- Describe the techniques to be used to generate and analyze the data.
- Demonstrate familiarity with prior work done in this area.
- Refer to current literature, especially your own work
- Summarize the key points of cited references and explain how your proposed work fits in.
- Demonstrate your team’s productivity at the facility, if applicable, by describing how the results of previous experiments were used and published.
- Describe related results (published and unpublished) from work done by your group.
- Include key data in graphic format.
- Explain why you need this particular user facility and instrument.
- Justify the amount of time requested.
- Identify potential show stoppers and how you plan to avoid them; if you don’t identify them, the reviewers will!
