Example · Granting agency or research funder
Which evidence should our next research call help produce?
A research funder investigates the questions behind a possible call on communication at home
The situation
Designing a research call
You are preparing a research call about BCI communication outside specialist laboratories. Before drafting its scope, you want to understand which practical questions published work can answer. The immediate decision is what applicants should investigate and report, rather than which technical approach the programme should favour
What this example starts with
- Available
- The public BCI catalogue provides a starting collection of cases and sources to inspect
- Unresolved
- You have not established how consistently sources describe home support, everyday use or interrupted sessions
- Constraint
- A short scoping exercise must distinguish a gap in documentation from an unanswered research question
Working through the question
Bound the collection
In Monitor, define the application and published population relevant to communication. Record the view, filters and date. Inspect whether the selected cases actually involve home use, because a communication label alone does not establish the setting the call is meant to address
Read behind the pattern
Open candidate records and follow their sources. For each, note whether setup, assistance, fatigue and continued use are discussed, absent from the inspected material or outside the study scope. Keep these distinctions instead of counting every missing field as missing research
Turn uncertainty into a question
Use the inspected cases to draft questions for a wider scoping discussion. For example, ask how future studies could describe support requirements consistently. Validate that proposed priority with relevant expertise and affected people before presenting it as an established field need
An illustrative take-away
A draft evidence agenda
Your scoping note connects each proposed reporting question to its rationale and remaining uncertainty
- Which activities and home conditions should a study describe?
- How could applicants report assistance and interrupted use?
- Which additional sources or perspectives could challenge this proposed priority?
Written for this example to show what the reader could take into their next conversation
The catalogue is selective; an unlisted study or undocumented topic is not evidence that no relevant work exists
Try this with your own question
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