Your Grant In Review: Overstuffing the Vertebrate Animals Section

There is little doubt that shortening the length of the NIH R01 application from 25 pages to 12 put a huge premium on the available word space. The ever declining success rates have undoubtedly accelerated the desire of applicants to cram every last bit of information that they possibly can into the application.

Particularly since StockCritique^TM having to do with methodological detail has hardly disappeared.

It is possible that a somewhat frustrated, tongue-in-cheek comment of YHN may have led some folks astray.

Since I am finally getting serious about trying to write one of these new format grants, I am thinking about how to maximize the information content. One thought that immediately strikes me is….cheat!

By which I mean taking sections that normally I would have put in the page-limited part of the grant and sneaking them in elsewhere. I have come up with the following and am looking for more tips and ideas from you, Dear Reader.
1) Moving the animal methods to the Vertebrate Animals section. I’m usually doing quite a bit of duplication of the Vertebrate Animals stuff in my General Methods subheading at the very end of the old Research Design section. I can move much of that, including possibly some research stuff that fits under point 4 (ensuring discomfort and distress is managed), to the Vertebrate Animals section.

Now mind you, one of my always perspicacious commenters was all over me right from the start:

DM – Please don’t encourage people to cheat their way out of 12 pages. Please tell them to write a 12-page grant.
I would warn grant-writers to be careful of cheating too much. I was at a study section recently where someone lost about a point of score because one of the reviewers (it wasn’t me, although I agree with the reviewer) complained about “cheating” by moving methods into the vertebrate animals section.

That was all back in March 2010. Here we are down the road and I have to say, DearReader, I am hearing a constant drum beat of irritation at people who cheat in just this way. My suggestion (a serious one) is to be very wary of putting what should be your research plan methods into the Vertebrate Animals section.

I am hearing and seeing situations in which reviewers pretty obviously are ticked and almost certainly are punishing the applications accordingly. Nobody likes a cheat. I have even heard of rare cases of people having their grants kicked back, unreviewed, because of this.

So be careful. Keep the Vertebrate Animals section on task and put your Methods where they belong.