Structure of An R01: Research Design & Methods

Quite a while back, I began–but never completed–a series on how to structure an effective R01 application. So far we have covered the Specific Aims and Background & Significance sections. Although the next consecutive section of an R01 app is the Preliminary Studies, in response to reader requests, we will skip over that for now and treat the Research Design & Methods. This is the section of the grant where you flesh out your Specific Aims in detail, and provide the specifics of your experimental plans.
(Detailed guidelines are inside the crack.)

Why GlamourMag Science is a Disaster for Scientific Progress, Part Eleventy

Browsing over DamnGoodTechnician’s recent posts for the one I was going to excoriate gently discuss, I ran across this gem:

Part of my project has been to recapitulate the results from a fairly recent Nature paper. I’m not sure how many of you have attempted this feat, but I believe deciphering the Rosetta Stone may have been simpler. What concentration of these ingredients did you use? WHICH of these ingredients did you use? How long? How many media changes? Transfection? Infection? Gack. The kicker is that the protocol induces a switch in cell fate, and the timecourse for that change is more or less two weeks, so any conditions I set up today as a “Let’s see if this set of conditions proves you guys weren’t lying” experiment won’t be ready to go until nearly May.
I’ve been banging my head on this protocol for about two months now

Word.