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?”Category: Grant Strategy
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”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.
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?”
The Chronic Problem of Predatory Journals
Predatory publishing is a threat to researchers publishing the results of their work and to the peer-reviewed medical literature itself.
I’ve blogged about the topic of predatory journals before, and not much
has changed. But as a grant writer/editor/applicant, the more you know
the better you can navigate the issue when presenting your biosketch
and selecting appropriate citations. 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
Demand Secure Data Handling for Your Research Projects
Using a spreadsheet application you would use for tracking your institution’s office supplies to collect and store human subjects research data is just not competitive (or ethical).
Using a spreadsheet application you would use for tracking your institution’s office supplies is just not competitive (or ethical).
As admitted technophiles, we really enjoy working at the data-driven intersection of health and technology, and we are happy to see the new and continued opportunities in that area coming out of NIH, PCORI, and other funders. But we also remain dismayed by proposals from institutions with access to RedCAP that propose storing sensitive patient data in a spreadsheet program on a server (no indication of the security level of the server). I would encourage all research faculty and staff to enquire about the details of data collection, management, security, and storage when signing on to be part of a research project involving any research data, but especially patient data, and to work with research partners to develop a plan for the data that leverages the secure resources at hand.
Reminder of Policy Changes — NIH Extramural Nexus
Today we reblog this piece from the NIH Extramural Nexus blog summarizing recently announced policy changes as a reminder to everyone (administrators, researchers, grant writers and editors, etc.) that substantial changes impacting grant proposals went into effect at the end of last month. Some of these changes can potentially impact your research design, recruitment plan, etc., so be sure to review these changes sooner rather than later… Continue reading “Reminder of Policy Changes — NIH Extramural Nexus”
Six Easy Online Tools Every Grant Seeker Should Use
Funders proliferate mission and vision statements across their communications, which should, in theory, make it easy for grant seekers to strategically align their applications with funders’ expectations. Often, however, mission and vision statements can be too broad to help individual grant seekers determine the goodness of fit for individual projects, resulting in a waste of time and effort.
Web sites can be useful resources if they are kept current, but they, too, are often formal and fairly general, and research highlighted on web sites provides a glance in the rearview mirror—that research was funded years ago, which doesn’t help you necessarily understand what’s winning awards now.
Here at Strategic Grantsmanship, it’s all about efficiency and how to win more grant money in less time. Time unnecessarily spent on the grants treadmill indiscriminately pursuing every opportunity that comes your way and might be a fit for your project keeps you away from what you really want to be doing, whether that’s working in the field or lab, running your business, or running with your dog. So here are six easy online tools I use to efficiently achieve insight into the current wants, needs, and interests of potential funders and accurately gauge if a funding opportunity is worth pursuing. Continue reading “Six Easy Online Tools Every Grant Seeker Should Use”
New Grant Samples! Get Them While They Are Fresh!
The confidential nature of research grants poses a challenge for new writers and researchers who are unfamiliar with grant proposals. The best way to learn how to write grants—by far—is to start writing grants as part of a team with experienced grant writers. This allows one to learn while doing under the tutelage of those who have honed their skills writing proposals for a variety of projects and funders. And, as I have said before, serving as a peer reviewer should be a required experience for every writer of grants.
For those unable to enter grant writing through these tried and true avenues, or for grant writers seeking to better understand what a funder’s “ideal” proposal looks like, sample grant proposals can prove quite valuable…and extremely hard to come by. For obvious reasons, these proposals are confidential. Getting a mentor or a colleague to share a proposal can seem a major victory, until you start asking yourself some key questions: Was this project funded? What were reviewers’ comments? What worked (and is worthy of emulation), and what did not? How old is this thing?
For all of these reasons and more, vetted samples of funded proposals can be invaluable to new writers of grants. Fortunately, some researchers share their funded proposals via funders’ web sites. After all, funders want applicants to understand what they are looking for so they can receive high-quality proposals.
Continue reading “New Grant Samples! Get Them While They Are Fresh!”
Strategic Grantsmanship 