research-grants
Research Grant Writing
Overview
Research grant writing is the process of developing competitive funding proposals for federal agencies and foundations. Master agency-specific requirements, review criteria, narrative structure, budget preparation, and compliance for NSF (National Science Foundation), NIH (National Institutes of Health), DOE (Department of Energy), DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), and Taiwan's NSTC (National Science and Technology Council) submissions.
Critical Principle: Grants are persuasive documents that must simultaneously demonstrate scientific rigor, innovation, feasibility, and broader impact. Each agency has distinct priorities, review criteria, formatting requirements, and strategic goals that must be addressed.
When to Use This Skill
This skill should be used when:
- Writing research proposals for NSF, NIH, DOE, DARPA, or NSTC programs
- Preparing project descriptions, specific aims, or technical narratives
- Developing broader impacts or significance statements
- Creating research timelines and milestone plans
- Preparing budget justifications and personnel allocation plans
- Responding to program solicitations or funding announcements
- Addressing reviewer comments in resubmissions
- Planning multi-institutional collaborative proposals
More from k-dense-ai/scientific-agent-skills
scientific-writing
Core skill for the deep research and writing tool. Write scientific manuscripts in full paragraphs (never bullet points). Use two-stage process with (1) section outlines with key points using research-lookup then (2) convert to flowing prose. IMRAD structure, citations (APA/AMA/Vancouver), figures/tables, reporting guidelines (CONSORT/STROBE/PRISMA), for research papers and journal submissions.
300scientific-critical-thinking
Evaluate scientific claims and evidence quality. Use for assessing experimental design validity, identifying biases and confounders, applying evidence grading frameworks (GRADE, Cochrane Risk of Bias), or teaching critical analysis. Best for understanding evidence quality, identifying flaws. For formal peer review writing use peer-review.
291scientific-brainstorming
Creative research ideation and exploration. Use for open-ended brainstorming sessions, exploring interdisciplinary connections, challenging assumptions, or identifying research gaps. Best for early-stage research planning when you do not have specific observations yet. For formulating testable hypotheses from data use hypothesis-generation.
289scientific-visualization
Meta-skill for publication-ready figures. Use when creating journal submission figures requiring multi-panel layouts, significance annotations, error bars, colorblind-safe palettes, and specific journal formatting (Nature, Science, Cell). Orchestrates matplotlib/seaborn/plotly with publication styles. For quick exploration use seaborn or plotly directly.
289literature-review
Conduct comprehensive, systematic literature reviews using multiple academic databases (PubMed, arXiv, bioRxiv, Semantic Scholar, etc.). This skill should be used when conducting systematic literature reviews, meta-analyses, research synthesis, or comprehensive literature searches across biomedical, scientific, and technical domains. Creates professionally formatted markdown documents and PDFs with verified citations in multiple citation styles (APA, Nature, Vancouver, etc.).
282paper-lookup
Search 10 academic paper databases via REST APIs for research papers, preprints, and scholarly articles. Covers PubMed, PMC (full text), bioRxiv, medRxiv, arXiv, OpenAlex, Crossref, Semantic Scholar, CORE, Unpaywall. Use when searching for papers, citations, DOI/PMID lookups, abstracts, full text, open access, preprints, citation graphs, author search, or any scholarly literature query. Triggers on mentions of any supported database or requests like "find papers on X" or "look up this DOI".
279