The first rule of writing? “Write to your audience!” For scientific and medical grant proposals, that audience comprises our human scientist and stakeholder peers. Or does it?
Continue reading “Has AI Changed Your Proposal’s Audience?”How to Clarify a Study’s Estimated Enrollment
Reviewers want to fund scientifically sound projects with the potential for great impact on health outcomes for all patients. Understand and acknowledge these expectations, then address them with the appropriate evidence to address those concerns.
You’ve designed your study in league with your community engagement and research teams. You have secured IRB approval, and you have drafted your funding proposal in collaboration with your site PIs and research team. Even with all the moving parts required for a study with human subjects, the research design has come together well.
Then you look at your estimated enrollment across study sites and stop short. They’re skewed. What to do now?
Continue reading “How to Clarify a Study’s Estimated Enrollment”Which Style Guide Is Best for Medical Writing & Editing?
Recently, a colleague new to the field posed a question to a group of professional medical writers and editors. Briefly, she asked which style guides, in addition to the AMA Manual of Style, are worth investing (time and money) as a new medical editor.
Continue reading “Which Style Guide Is Best for Medical Writing & Editing?”The EU’s World-Class R&D Funding and Support for Innovators
New pharma startups have more non-dilutive funding opportunities than they may realize–they just have to know where to look and open their minds.
Sometimes, US-based small startups find their evolving R&D plan, funding, or business collaborations make them suddenly ineligible for SBIR funding they had targeted. For example, clinical trial costs or even lab work would be cheaper overseas, so, just like that, eligibility slips away.
What to do? Continue reading “The EU’s World-Class R&D Funding and Support for Innovators”
How to Use Emphasis in a Grant Abstract…and Beyond
Recently, the question arose as to whether it is appropriate to use emphasis (bold, italic, underline) in an NIH grant abstract. Here is my advice!
Recently, the question arose as to whether it is appropriate to use emphasis (bold, italic, underline) in an NIH grant project summary/abstract. After all, the person pointed out, this section is posted in NIH RePORTER in plain text, without any emphasis. Here is my reply to that query:
Emphasis is a strategy targeting the reviewer audience. More specifically, it assists the reviewers who were not assigned the proposal for primary or secondary review and may be looking at the package for the first time in real time in the review session.
With that audience in mind, my strategy is to emphasize key terms to visually ‘index’ the paragraph to provide multiple easy access points to the material, since usually it’s solid text. You can emphasize the key structural elements of the proposal, like ‘long-term goal,’ ‘rationale,’ ‘specific aims,’ etc. But you can also sparingly emphasize other key words, ‘innovative’ or ‘novel,’ for example, to draw the reader’s eye to that key information.
Just like elsewhere in the application, emphasis should be used sparingly in this section. If everything’s important, nothing’s important. In such a constricted space, restricting emphasis to the key words or phrases creates that ‘indexing’—emphasizing whole sentences as one might in a longer section muddies the waters and undermines the value of the emphasis. (Also, I am more familiar with using underlined italics [rather than, say bold], for this purpose. I tend to reserve bold for section headings and the specific aims.)
So yes, when writing or editing the project summary/abstract section (hereafter let’s use simply “abstract” to keep things succinct) of an NIH grant, it is not only appropriate but strategic to use emphasis to assist reviewers in understanding your proposed project. A fellow editor who agreed with this approach also suggested that sometimes you can take strategic use of emphasis to focus a reader’s attention a step further. If your project is wildly transformative and the other elements of your proposal are not unusual, she advocates limiting the application of emphasis to only the description of the transformative element(s) of the proposal.
Emphasis plays an important role in strategic grantsmanship, not only in the abstract but throughout the proposal. When used consistently and conservatively, emphasis helps the reader distinguish the main points of the proposal. As I alluded to in my initial response, there is an expectation that certain elements of proposals will be emphasized. To elaborate, not meeting those formatting expectations can distract experienced reviewers. Why make it hard for people to give you funding? Meet expectations and let your innovative ideas be what captures their attention.
While most grant writers would prefer to think readers and reviewers are soaking up every word of their proposal, it is important to acknowledge that each proposal has multiple audiences to which the writer must appeal. Strategic use of emphasis provides one of the most useful tools for mastering that complicated task.
The Ongoing Problem of Predatory Journals
Citation contamination amplifies the dangers of predatory journals.
In late September, the number of predatory journals on the Journal Blacklist surpassed 12,000. For context, the number of journals on the list has tripled since the list was established in 2017.
While issues of integrity, ethics, and tenure bubble to the surface in any discussion of predatory journals, it’s important to remember the potential practical impacts. That is, the potential for harm when the outcomes of a flawed study spread into the clinical, research, and policy arenas.
This danger arises not only through the initial publication of the article (which may have low initial visibility due to the lack of quality of the journal), but via references to these studies in the legitimate scientific literature, “citation contamination.” In the same way ill-gotten profits can be spent in the open after being passed through legitimate businesses, these articles gain legitimacy by being cited in established publications and databases. These associations enable the dissemination of these studies far beyond the level offered by their initial publication in the sub-standard journal.
The Scholarly Kitchen published the findings of a study to determine the impact of citation contamination and found that, while the percentage of contaminated citations is relatively few, the sheer volume of output by the predatory journals makes that percentage significant. The author indicates that 36% of one predatory journal’s articles had been cited in the legitimate literature.
What should researchers/editors/writers do?
- Understand the threat predatory journals present to your research and your reputation. At the end of July, AMWA-EMWA-ISMPP* released a joint position statement on predatory publishing and its “threat both to researchers publishing the results of their work and to the peer-reviewed medical literature itself.” You can read the full statement in Current Medical Research and Opinion here.
*AMWA – American Medical Writers Association
EMWA – European Medical Writers Association
ISMPP – International Society for Medical Publication Professionals - Proactively research a journal before submitting your research for publication. Unfortunately, journals are bought and sold, so don’t assume a journal you found legitimate last year still meets your standards this year. Do a little research before subsequent submissions to rule out big changes.
- Closely review any published research you consult for development of your own research and publications. Eschew the use of research published in predatory journals.
If you mentor researchers, editors, or writers who are new to the field, you occupy a key position in the fight against predatory publishers. That’s not to imply that professionals at any point in their career are immune to the problem of predatory journals (and conferences). But it is to say that the ease with which one can garner a first publication via one of these journals can obscure the decision-making process of a new professional without specific knowledge about the peer-review and publishing processes. By educating your new colleagues about these processes and the threats posed by predatory forces in these industries, you safeguard not just a reputation or a career, but also the integrity of research, public policy, and clinical practice.
Always Do This after You Press “Submit”
A recent bug in the NIH submission system replaced some PDF files with blank pages. It wasn’t because the applicants were people of few words, it was a problem with the portal’s software. So, all those blank proposals were the NIH’s problem to solve, right? Wrong. Continue reading “Always Do This after You Press “Submit””
Hyperlinks in a Grant–Yes or No?
Hyperlinks provide a clean, efficient way to offer readers additional information or clarifications of key ideas in our prose, and they allow us to keep our missives targeted and brief. However, the NIH holds two things sacrosanct–page limits and reviewer anonymity–and both are potentially violated by the use of hyperlinks in grant applications.
Hyperlinks provide a clean, efficient way to offer readers additional information or clarifications of key ideas in our prose, and they allow us to keep our missives targeted and brief. However, the NIH holds two things sacrosanct–page limits and reviewer anonymity–and both are potentially violated by the use of hyperlinks in grant applications. Continue reading “Hyperlinks in a Grant–Yes or No?”
Catching up with NCAM2019
Today we share 3 cybersecurity threats you need to know about–and how you can easily fix them yourself.
October is National Cybersecurity Awareness Month! All this month we are partnering with our colleagues in the DCC cyber group to provide tips and information for keeping you (and your data) cyber safe. You can read more on the cyber group’s blog and website, and don’t forget to check out their 31 Days of Cybersecurity, which will run all through October.*
Today we share 3 cybersecurity threats you need to know about–and how you can easily fix them yourself.
1.
I am looking forward to seeing many of you at the American Medical Writers Association conference in San Diego next month. If I see you at the airport, I hope it’s not at a public charging kiosk without appropriate cyber protection–because that cord that charges your phone also transfers data up and down. [Read more here.]
2.
Do you install extensions on your browser? They sure can be handy tools, but what do you really know about them? Find out which ad blocking extensions were found to be malware and how you can guard yourself against the threat posed to your online security by browser extensions. [Read more here.]
3.
Do you use Google Calendar? Many of us do. But did you know that a bug in the application makes you vulnerable to smishing? Safeguard yourself with two easy changes to your settings and, of course, vigilance. [Read more here.]
NCAM2019 will end . . . then what?
For weekly summaries of hot topics, check out the DCCCyberScoop. Links to existing issues are below, and you can get future issues delivered directly to your inbox by subscribing.
DCCCyberScoop Issue #3 (11 October 2019)
DCCCyberScoop Issue #2 (03 October 2019)
DCCCyberScoop Issue #1 (25 September 2019)
For more information on these and other cyber threats and what you can do to address them, you can go to their website.
To learn more about cybersecurity for individuals and small businesses, check out the Freelancer’s Guide to Cybersecurity and its list of resources.
*Our cyber group blogs about cyber threats facing professionals in our data-rich space, but does it in plain language. Most plain-language material is written for readers interested in protecting their family’s online privacy, which is actually quite different from the threats faced by consultants, freelancers, solopreneurs, and other small businesses. Our cyber group takes that plain-language approach and scales it up for the more rigorous threats these professionals face.
If you ever work remotely (as is common in grant writing/editing and academic spaces), or if you take your personal devices into your or your clients’ workspace, you should be picking up what the cyber group is putting down.
How Safe Is Your Data? Join Us for National Cybersecurity Awareness Month
Everyone can benefit from being more cyber aware! We have partnered with Duke City Consulting to offer our followers a month of cybersecurity tips and tricks.
Everyone–small businesses, large organizations, individuals–can benefit from being more cyber aware, which is why Strategic Grantsmanship is partnering with Duke City Consulting’s Cyber Group (DCC Cyber) for National Cybersecurity Awareness Month (NCSAM). DCC Cyber specializes in plain language cybersecurity for small and emerging businesses, from freelancers and solopreneurs to lean startups and consultancies.
Continue reading “How Safe Is Your Data? Join Us for National Cybersecurity Awareness Month”
Strategic Grantsmanship 