Discovering Funding Sources with Dimensions at University of Colorado, Boulder

Donna offers faculty individual funding consultations and 30-minute Find Funding workshops using Dimensions. The competition for grant money has always been competitive, and with pressures arising from COVID-19, it’s necessary to use every available advantage.

The Find Funding sessions were initially offered to University of Colorado Boulder (CU Boulder) faculty; however they became so popular that the workshops expanded to include graduate students, post-docs, and even staff. Now almost anyone interested across campus can leverage Dimensions search methods to locate potential sponsors for their scholarly and creative research.

One of Donna’s favorite techniques is to copy and paste the entire abstract of a proposal into the Abstract Search field. This brings up a list of the most relevant documents and publications—and researchers always find this interesting because they can easily learn what is innovative about their projects, as well as what others are doing in their field. But to find funding sources, Donna steers them towards the Grants tab to find the funders for those similar projects, one of the key features of Dimensions.

In Dimensions, in-depth information is available on the funder and the grants. For instance, if a grant is from a large sponsor like the National Science Foundation, users can drill down in Dimensions to see if it’s from a specific call within a certain division. By examining what grants were funded over time, trends about the sponsor’s changing interests emerge to help researchers determine if their project is a fit. Donna recommends using Dimensions to find potential new sponsors, including potential international cross-collaborations Proposals need to be innovative to get funding. Exploring the publications results generated from the abstract search, CU Boulder researchers enjoy discovering if their idea is unique or being able to find out that someone they are familiar with is working in a new area.

Dimensions is becoming a popular resource across campus and earns high marks for its ease-of-use. Even the back button functionality is highly rated because it allows users to explore deep tangents and still return to their original search. To familiarize herself better with the database, Donna finds the Dimensions online trainings to be very useful and recommends them to anyone who wants to use the product to its fullest.

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