Zheng Yan

Research grants are a critical means for research policy, research management, and research administration to generate scientific breakthroughs, technical innovations, and social impacts. Currently, the exponential growth of the research literature on research grants has been scattered across diverse outlets and disciplines. The present paper is the first scoping review to generate an overall coherent picture of the science of research grants or grantology by focusing on the basic literature published from 1970 to 2020. Based on both a process-based conceptual framework and 275 identified important research articles, we synthesize the current knowledge in seven key areas, i.e., grant writers, grant writing, grant agents, grant review, grant projects, grant management, and grant impacts. Our review indicates that three major topics, grant writing practices, grant review, and scientific impacts, have dominated the existing literature, Future research should examine four key topics, development of grant writers, grant resubmission, grant professionals, and grant use, to further advance the science of research grants. Limitations and implications of the study are discussed.

In cybersecurity practice, two methodological challenges exist, that is, how to improve validity and reliability of cybersecurity assessment as a weak hypothesis and how to assess and mitigate cybersecurity risks among the K-12 school population as the weakest link. To address these two challenges, the present study aimed to verify the validity and reliability of one newly developed questionnaire, Cybersecurity Judgment Questionnaire for Middle and High School Students, using the Rasch modeling. A total of 398 middle and high school students from the GenCyber Camps participated in this study. The results of the Rasch model analysis show that (1) the Cybersecurity Judgment Questionnaire was unidimensional, measuring one single construct of cybersecurity judgment; (2) the questionnaire had acceptable item construct validity and person construct validity; (3) the item reliability and person reliability of the questionnaire were also acceptable, and (4) a few items might need revisions to increase item difficulty and reduce redundancy, if this would be confirmed by more replication studies with more representative samples. Suggestions for improvement and administration of the questions are discussed.