Eligibility & Grants | Application | Selection Criteria

The following selection criteria are adopted from FENS Principles for ranking student applications available as a PDF document on FENS web pages.

a) Publications

Total number of publications: score: 0 - 1 - 2 - 3 (no - few - moderate - many)
Peer reviewed papers: score: 0 - 1 - 2 - 3 (no - few - moderate - many)
Presentations at Meetings score: 0 - 1 - 2 - 3 (no - few - moderate - many)

b) Age Bonus Scores

5 (age < 25)
4 (age 25 - 27)
3 (age 28 - 29)
2 (age 30 - 31)
1 (age 32 - 34) (limit of ”young scientist” criterion of EU)
0 (> 34) (accepted only if date of PhD is less than 5 years by time of the school)

c) General Evaluation of the Candidate

Global evaluation of the candidate’s suitability for the school:
score: 0 - 1 - 2 - 3 (null - low - average - excellent)

Further Explanation

Total Number of Publications
Please include original papers, reviews, invited papers (book chapters etc.). First authorship does not need to be rated since for young scientists this may depend on factors that cannot be evaluated fairly across countries and institutions.

Peer Reviewed Papers
Please include only internationally refereed journals. As above, first authorship does not need to be scored. However you may whish to add an extra point for papers in highly prestigious journals such as Nature, Science or Neuron. Notice that the papers in refereed journals weight heavily since they are also scored in the total number of publications.

Presentations at Meetings
This is meant to emphasize the importance of disseminating results to the scientific community and to evaluate the ”subthreshold” productivity and maturity of the candidate.

Age-Bonus
It is clear that the scoring system proposed would select applicants primarily according to their publication record. This would mean that young promising scientists with highly relevant work, but only few publications might fail to pass the cut-off score. Therefore, the age bonus was applied. In our past experience, adding the bonus score 1-5 as described above, resulted in a balanced selection of younger and more advanced scientists, which can be seen from the histograms of the age distribution of all applicants compared with those accepted for the school and those who were rejected. The maximum bonus score of 5, however, avoids that applicants would be selected only because of (young) age.

General Evaluation of the Candidate
You will probably find in the CV elements that impress you favorably with the professional trajectory of the candidate, and which allow some prediction as to the benefits that he/she will derive from attending the school.

Additional criteria can be used if uncertain between two or more candidates, i.e.
Abstract related to topic of school: score: 0 - 1 - 2 - 3 (not - hardly - moderately - highly)
Recommendation score: 0 - 1 - 2 - 3 (no - weak - moderate - strong)
Arguments for attending score: 0 - 1 - 2 - 3 (no - weak - moderate - strong)