You are a praised researcher, but is your track record indeed enough to be competitive for a highly prestigious grant such as ERC? This is obviously the million-euro question. One that we can help answering.
Below you can find the questions we typically ask when assessing a candidate’s profile and building a winning narrative.
Track record competitiveness
checklist for ERC
- Can you name your achievements?
- Have you been clearly in the lead?
- Are you recognised for those achievements?
- Have you benchmarked yourself?
- Do you have a clear and convincing narrative
describing your track record?
Why is my track record that important for ERC?
ERC grants aim to support and propel research excellence. Your ERC grant proposal is evaluated on (1) your scientific vision and plan and (2) your scientific credentials. In a way, an ERC grant is both a reward for the past and an incentive for the future.
Having said that, a great idea is one, but its execution is another. The panel will evaluate your track record to assess your capability to perform the proposed research at the highest possible level. They won’t read all of your papers though, your application should be able to summarise your track record concisely and convinvingly.
In our experience, track record competitiveness can be well predicted. There are a couple of factors we look at: can you name your achievements? Have you been clearly in the lead for those major achievements? And, are you recognised by others for those achievements?
Q1 – Can you name the major achievements that shape your track record?
We cannot convince the evaluation panel of your capabilities if you are not capable of naming them. Obviously.
However, reality is a little more complicated: scientific progress usually does not come in leaps, but rather in small steps of progressing insights. Still, we need to craft a narrative that pinpoints your major achievements and when and how they took place. Importantly, also panel members from outside your field will need to recognise the highlights of your track record.
Oftentimes this requires a little bit of digging, storytelling skills and it is always a honour to jointly deep dive in your journey so far.
Q2 – Have you been clearly in the lead in those major achievements?
Researcher independence is an important factor for ERC. Being an individual grant, you will (as the PI) be on your own to execute the project. In practice this means you need to be a first or last author on key papers. Importantly, those key papers represent original research (meaning, no reviews or meta analyses) and, for StG, CoG and SyG, the work should not have been done under supervision of e.g. your PhD supervisor.
Q3 – Are you recognised by others for those achievements?
Evaluators will not accept your word to justify your excellence. They rely on others to recognise it. How recognition is established from researcher to researcher and from field to field. It can for example come from papers in key journals, but also from invited speakership, honorary positions, (licensed) patents, monographs, expert roles, etc.
Q4 – Does that mean I need a paper in Nature of Science?
Yes, and no. Or better: it depends. There are two important perspectives to this: firstly, it is a matter of the specific competition in your field and the panel you aim to apply for. If you are in a panel where the standard is papers in Nature or Science, it will be very difficult to stand out in that realm without one.
Secondly, it is a matter of research quality. You may say that impact factor is not everything. And, there is certainly truth in that. Having said that though, papers in high-impact journals typically have certain qualities in them. This is of course the breakthrough potential of the novel insights presented. But also, the comprehensiveness in the scientific approach. To give an example, for novel pathological mechanisms (i.e., novel insights in how certain diseases work) to be published in Nature or Science, they need be fully resolved through validation with the latest methodologies in several models that together represent the most relevant contexts for human physiology.
In summary, you could say that if your peers are able to publish in journals with a certain impact, you should be too in order to be competitive in ERC.
Q5 – What can I do to figure out whether my track record is competitive in ERC?
There are a couple of things you can do. For example, you can ask your peers how they perceive your scientific achievements. How would they phrase them? What are key papers (and their limitations) in their perspective? Secondly, you can do a benchmark. For all our clients, we evaluate projects that were granted in their panel over the last two years via the ERC dashboard of funded projects. This provides a good perspective on what is needed to be considered for ERC in a specific panel.
NB: don’t let outliers fool you. There may always be projects granted to researchers with non-standard profiles (e.g. lower impact papers). When digging a bit deeper, it usually becomes clear why these researchers do stand out in their own ways.
Q6 – ERC has announced a policy update 2024 – how will this change things?
In 2024, the European Research Council has updated its policy. Scientific excellence remains the sole criterion. There are some changes to the structure of the CV and track record as well as to the evaluation procedure that put greater emphasis on the quality of the project.
In practice, there will be more opportunities to describe your track record, rather than to rely on facts alone. This means that there is bit more room to substantiate non-conventional track records. It still means though that your achievements should be identifiable, recognised and competitive against the other candidates in your panel. And, your track record should, maybe even more than before, describe in detail your capabilities to execute the project at the highest possible level of excellence.
Q7 – How can ERC.support help?
As you have learned from the above, track record competitiveness can be assessed and benchmarked. This is always the starting point of our support. We have developed several tools to do in-depth benchmarking. In addition, we provide coaching services for researchers that are on the verge of being competitive.
In addition, assessing your journey so far is crucial to draft the proposals narrative. As part of our services, we help crafting a convincing narrative that tightly integrates your past and how the project will shape your future.
Do you want to learn more about our services?
To learn more about our ERC grant writing services, you can find more on our dedicated pages for ERC Starting Grant, ERC Consolidator Grant, ERC Advanced Grant, ERC Synergy Grant and ERC Proof of Concept Grant. You can also book an introduction meeting below or drop us a message.
UPDATE: We are happy to inform you we have secured additional capacity for the upcoming deadlines.