GrantRant VIII
January 19, 2013
Do not EVER spend so much time geeking away about the amazingly swell trees that you will be characterizing that you forget to convince the reviewer that the forest itself holds any interest. And I mean ANY interest…..Seriously dudes, I’m trying to help you out here but you are giving me absolutely nothing to work with. There is barely any point in me even reading your experimental manipulations….I can tell already there is no overall justification for doing them in the first place!
DrugMonkey 
January 19, 2013 at 4:57 pm
Sounds like an application that wound up in the wrong study section.
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January 19, 2013 at 5:01 pm
Not at all, not at all.
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January 19, 2013 at 7:04 pm
Wait, what? I thought you said that in a world of PLoS ONE, all science is intrinsically publishable and therefore worth doing.
Or do you find that value judgments about how interesting some research is are actually important, after all?
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January 19, 2013 at 7:56 pm
You are comparing apples and oranges, and djmh. Grant proposals need to be evaluated on interest because it’s a zero-sum game – if proposal a gets funded proposal b can’t be. This isn’t the case for manuscripts – publishing one doesn’t mean you can’t publish another just because it isn’t as interesting.
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January 20, 2013 at 5:25 am
1) I never said “all” DJMH
2) JB has the (obvious) right of it in this case
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January 20, 2013 at 6:58 am
Can I quote you on that?
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January 20, 2013 at 8:06 am
This type of applicant tends to say “well I only got a low score on Significance, so I don’t understand why it was triaged”
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January 20, 2013 at 11:14 am
On what?
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January 20, 2013 at 3:48 pm
Money is one limited resource. Time is another. I don’t sift through PONE every day because my time is more valuable to me than that. This is why I still appreciate the fact that J Neurosci (or whatever) filters papers sp I see what’s more interesting.
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January 20, 2013 at 8:32 pm
Searching by TOC rather than keywords on pubMed as anything other than a tertiary strategy for “keeping up” verges on scientific incompetence.
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January 21, 2013 at 8:01 am
Recently read a proposal that was all about the trees. It didn’t help that it was margin to margin text with no white space. There didn’t seem to be anything wrong with the experiments, but the only reason I could see for doing them would be because someone else might figure out something useful to do with the information. Clearly, this guy’s not going to.
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January 21, 2013 at 10:37 am
What gets me is when they don’t even act like there could be a forest. Like all that one possibly needs for justification is the awesomeness with which they will characterize bark patterns on the upper 19% of limbs on White Pine.
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