Full disclosure to the higher education consumer
January 31, 2014
An article in Slate makes the case, a bit excitedly, that popular college/University ranking entities should present the ratio of permanent to temporary faculty more prominently. I agree wholeheartedly that this is information the consumer needs to know. The relative adjunctification is highly pertinent to the quality of education on offer.
The simple ratio of teaching bodies is not enough, though it is probably the only thing Deans and Presidents are willing to report.
Ideally the percentage of student contact hours, including labs and sections, would be reported by tenure track status of the instructor.
Maybe the problem in NIH grant award is in topic diversity?
January 29, 2014
I had a thought occur to me over the past few days. It’s been growing along at the back of my mind and is only partially crystallized.
What if PIs of a given class of interest, whether that be sex, ethnicity, nation of origin or whatever, are not randomly distributed across the various topic domains supported by the NIH? What if a PI of characteristic X tends to work on Topic B using Model M whereas a PI of characteristic Y tends to work on Topic A using Model H?
What if the funding rates for Topic X differed from those for Topic Y? Or if applications using Model M consistently succeeded differently compared with applications using Model H?
I didn’t see any covariates for topic domain or even the funding IC in the Ginther report.
Surely someone at NIH is thinking about this. Surely?
I have two anecdotes for your consideration.
First, as with many areas of science, the ones dear to me suffer from a sex bias. There is a huge tendency to do the animal studies in male animals. Any study using female animals is very frequently a sex comparison study and is proposed explicitly or implicitly as a comparison with the default, i.e. male. I’ve talked about this before. The NIH also takes pains to fix the generalized reluctance via their most functional technique, the call for applications for a dedicated pool of money. In theory, the awarding of grants on sex-differences or on issues specific to women’s health will then spur additional work. Perhaps create a sustained program or even a career of work on this topic.
My anecdote is that I’ve noticed over the years (possible confimation bias here) that women in my field have a greater representation than men in these sorts of studies. Sex-differences models and womans’ health issues in my fields of interest seem to have women as the driving investigators more often than their overall representation.
If this generalizes, then we will want to know if the competitive success of such grant applications because of topic is contaminating our estimation of women PI’s success.
The second anecdote is older and comes from my long history participating on the “Diversity” committees of various academic institutions. Back in the dark ages I recall an incident where a Prof in the experimental sciences had to go to war with a Dean who was in charge of undergraduate summer research funds for underrepresented individuals. The Prof had a candidate who wanted to work in the experimental science, but the awards were generally being made to kids who wanted to work on academic topics related to underrepresented groups. The Dean thought this was the most important thing to do. In this case the prof won his battle in the second year of trying, over the objections of the Dean. I keep in touch with some of my undergraduate professors and I can say that said undergrad went on to become a NIH funded investigator (who still fails to work on issues directly related to underrepresentation). I have no idea if any of the other underrepresented summer research students went on to glorious academic careers in their respective disciplines, perhaps they did. But this is not the point. The point is that perhaps I am a little too glib about the pipeline implications of Ginther. Perhaps the grooming of underrepresented minority undergrads for a career in academics is itself not topic neutral. And the shaping and shifting from that very early stage may dictate field of study and therefore the eventual success rate at the NIH game.
Assuming, of course, that Topic X enjoys differential success rate from Topic Y when the grants are under review at the NIH.
The woman wrote it you know.
January 29, 2014
Although I always knew his sister Peggy wrote this song, I have always had the Pete Seeger version of this in my head. I’m not the only one, either. And that’s just kind of blazingly ironic isn’t it? anyway, Peggy Seeger’s famous anthem performed by Peggy Seeger
Thought of the Day
January 29, 2014
Should I cite my research articles “diversely”?
That is, should I give the slightest thought to whether the people I cite, the lab heads in particular, represent the full diversity of my field? Of my country? The world?
If I consider this at all, am I compromising the purity and integrity of my research manuscripts?
Always good to review Jay Smooth's advice on -ists
January 24, 2014
I'm sorry….but you brought this on yourself, honey.
January 23, 2014
The intro may be trigger-y for some.
whaddayamean hockey players are thugs? …..oh.
January 22, 2014
Thoughts of the Day
January 22, 2014
I’m looking at the table of contents of a journal that, as many of them do, is going through a bout of hand wringing over it’s impact factor.
Three article titles in and…I’m fighting to keep my eyes open. FFS, get some more interesting titles.
Second, and this is the big one, just about every frigging article screams “We couldn’t get this into Nature Neuroscience or Neuron so we’re dumping it here“. Sorry, but when you are positioned with a scope that is nearly identical to other journals of much higher JIF, this is what happens. Your JIF gradually swirls the drain.
Repost: You Will Respect My Authoritah!
January 22, 2014
I am amused today by two individuals who simply cannot wrap their heads around the idea that one’s authority and influence in a given area is not uniquely and solely tied to ones accomplishments in traditional academic professional pursuits. One such individual is over at Isis’ place:
And it’s also telling that, now that I know your identity, I find myself actually more educated and qualified than you, but I wouldn’t speak on half the topics you did. Makes me wonder if anonymity didn’t make you feel more important than you actually were.
I really look forward to seeing what possibly makes someone more qualified than Isis to address the topics she blogs on. Really, I do. A Ph.D. in DomesticandLaboratoryGoddessology perhaps?
The other credential humper is over at Mike Eisen’s blog:
You don’t know who I am, what my qualifications are, where I studied, where I am from, or what my research is about. But why should I be granted a soapbox to stand on and criticize you when you can’t necessarily respond. How am I qualified in saying anything without my credentials to back it up?
Well, try saying something. If it makes any sense, people will tend to grant you a soapbox. This is called “blog traffic”. If you are not saying anything useful, you will enjoy the sound of crickets. Putting your “credentials” on the masthead will only take you so far in this, trust me.
Oh, glory, this one doubled down.
she used Dr. Isis to put herself above those 7 billion people without the credentials to back it up no? In the end, Dr.Gee showed that she was insignificant in the community. I don’t want to mention her identity here but her actual education and credentials have very little to do with half the stuff she’s commented on and used her anonymity to be an authority on things she really wasn’t. Because anonymously I can be Stephen Hawking,
No, actually you can’t. Christ I weep for the Academy (and public life) if people really think that credibility and influence only comes from a certain set of professional/academic credentials.
Anyway, I think it worthwhile reposting the following. Pay special attention to the occupational hazards of being an academic.
The great sociological philosopher Eric Cartman provided a bit of gentle guidance on acceding to the wisdom of authority in one of his more famous works. A somewhat lesser philosophical talent offers similar advice in a comment posted to a recent discussion on pseudonymous/anonymous blogging at bablab. The commenter suggested that:
… there are a lot of areas, even in science, where experience (from which real authority derives) matters. An undergraduate who has never been to the field and an experienced geologist can go up to the same geological formation and have the same tools and the same list of tests and procedures. They can both do similar things to the sediments, and they can end up with totally different conclusions as to what they are looking at.
They both have the same argument, structurally, logically, but with different conclusions. The experienced geologist, however, is much more likely to be correct.
An excellent rationale for prioritizing scientific contributions on the basis of the contributor’s credentials, is it not?
Drivers are unsafe at any Blood Alcohol Concentration?
January 22, 2014
A reasonably provocative paper which suggests that automobile drivers are impaired at a blood alcohol concentration (BAC) as low as 0.01% has recently appeared.
Phillips DP, Sousa AL, Moshfegh RT. Official blame for drivers with very low blood alcohol content: there is no safe combination of drinking and driving.Inj Prev. 2014 Jan 7. doi: 10.1136/injuryprev-2013-040925. [Epub ahead of print][Pubmed][Publisher]
When I was first told of this finding, my initial curiosity was not so much about the findings but more about the design. It is incredibly difficult to come up with ways to compare drinking driver versus non-drinking driver stats in field studies or data mining retrospectives.
The authors drew data from US traffic fatalities1 recorded in the National Center for Health Statistics database and the Fatality Analysis Reporting System database. The study sought to test the hypothesis that driver BAC would be related to the driver being determined to be solely and officially at blame for the crash. There are numerous factors that were coded for drivers including “under the influence of alcohol, drugs or medication” and “driving on wrong side of the road”. The “under the influence…” factor was dropped from all analyses for the obvious reasons that it would contaminate their test of hypothesis.
This is important for the reader to grapple with his or her most obvious complaint about this design. If the police officer is determining the responsibility and can smell (or otherwise detect) alcohol on one driver, this puts a bias in the outcome measure (responsibility for the crash) that would tend to correlate with the thing being tested (BAC). So the authors focused on the factors that were seemingly unambiguous. Such as “running off road” or “driving wrong way on one-way” versus “unsafe speed for conditions” and other ambiguous factors that depend on a police judgement.
The authors calculated the Sole Official Blame (SOB) as the number of drivers officially and solely blamed for the crash divided by the number of drivers officially assigned no blame for the crash. They also calculated the percentage of drivers blamed solely and officially for the crash divided by the total number of drivers involved. 
Figure 1 from the paper presents the SOB by the BAC for both male and female drivers. The solid line is the “All Blame Factors” and the dotted line is for the unambiguous factors- the far better measure2, IMO. These data do make a case that fatal crash risk is an essentially linear function of BAC. Importantly, there is no inflection of the curve at either 0.08 or 0.1 BAC which have been the US legal limits during my driving lifetime. The error bars are 95% confidence intervals and they are using lack of overlap of the 95% CI as their inferential statistic indicating a significant difference (they also include a chi-square statistic for the 0.1 BAC vs sober bin). So far, so good. BAC is linearly correlated with the risk of being the sole and officially blamed driver for a fatal accident. [UPDATE: I didn’t originally catch a bit of a dodge the authors are pulling here. The inferential analyses are conducted on the “all blame factors. Then they state “these patterns hold when one considered all blame factors or unambiguous factors”. This “pattern” language is sometimes used to skip over the fact that the inferential analysis didn’t hold up on the other variable(s). This is a big problem, given my questions about the contamination of the blame issue if the officer knows one driver had been drinking alcohol.]
An interesting side-analysis looked at the problem that BAC is not always measured which could introduce a bias. I’m assuming that the first analysis used only verified negative BAC “sober” drivers but it is hard to find this directly stated. Anyway, they looked at the correlation on a state-by-state basis between the SOB “buzzed”, aka 0.1 BAC and SOB sober (which was 2.09 for the overall dataset), and the percent of unmeasured BACs in the fatal crash listing. The correlation was negative, showing that the lower the proportion of unmeasured BACs in a state, the larger the difference between sober and 0.1% BAC drivers in fatal crash responsibility. So if anything, I guess we have to assume that a lower percentage of blood testing results in an underestimate of the crash risk.
The authors next moved on to take a crack at the question of circumstances. In essence it addressed the question of whether people driving at 0.1% BAC are doing so under risky circumstances. At night, for example.
The third Figure from the paper depicts SOB ratio and the Percent Blamed for a subset of two-car crash pairings in which one driver was sober and the other was at a positive BAC. The beauty here is that nondriver circumstances are as identical as you can get for the sober and intoxicated drivers. The authors performed 16 chi-square tests but a quick multiple-comparisons adjustment to the listed p values shows they still survive as all of them being different, BAC vs sober, for SOB and P measures. Odds of being at fault are 60/40 for 0.1% BAC versus sober and about 80/20 by the time you reach two car crashes in which one driver was at 0.08% BAC. Interestingly this is the analysis that appears to show some categorical difference between BAC of 0.1-0.3% and BAC of 0.6-0.8%. They also did a cute little comparison of paired-crashes where one driver was at 0.08 and the other was 0.5-0.7 BAC. The SOB did not differ (95% CI overlap) in this analysis.
As a final note, a bunch of supplementary analyses were provided to try to rule in or out additional driver (sex, race), vehicle (speed and model year) and circumstantial (raining, time, location) factors. The relationship of SOB with BAC persisted.
Probably my largest question about traffic risks conferred by low levels of alcohol consumption is captured by the report of the relative effect size of the “most common driver factors” in Table 1. The “Driving too fast for conditions or in excess of the posted speed limit” factor is a large contributor to SOB ratio in the 0.1-0.7%BAC drivers as well as one of the larger differences from the sober drivers. This underlines a suspicion that those who are willing to drive after a low amount of alcohol consumed are perhaps innately different from those who are not. They might be somewhat more of a risk taker. Here, we’d really want to get at the population that is willing to drive after a drink or two and look at their driving crash risk when they are sober. Methodologically, this is asking for a lot, I realize.
This is only one study, of course. There may be other data out there that show a less continuous function of fatal crash risk to BAC in this range below the current US legal limit. But this is for sure an important study.
__
1authors say that there is no sufficiently detailed database for nonfatal crashes, sady.
2Still trying to wrap my head around whether these “unambiguous” factors are in fact uncontaminated by the police officer’s knowledge that one of the drivers had been drinking. Presumably they write up their reports somewhat after they have investigated. Maybe I’m searching for rigor where none is needed but it still bugs me.
Repost: Major, Jack, Willie and Warren
January 21, 2014
Huh. A bit surprised I never had occasion to repost this. Well, the conversation about the Ginther report and disparity in NIH Grant success reminded me of this.
Originally posted 03/23/09.
In the year 1899 an American cyclist won the world championship in the 1-mile track event. In those days, track cycling was what really mattered and cycling was a reasonably big deal. So this was an event in sport. An even bigger deal was the fact that Marshall “Major” Taylor (Wikipedia) was black. This fact was, likewise, important:
The League of American Wheelmen, then the governing body for the sport, banned blacks from amateur racing in 1894, just as bicycling’s popularity surged.
The protection afforded by pseudonyms depends on the community
January 21, 2014
As you know, DearReader, I blog and engage with the Twittersphere under a pseudonym. I do so for a variety of reasons, some of which were in the forefront when I started and are no longer really an issue. Some reasons have appeared or become strengthened over time. Some are relatively more important to me and some are less important.
Some of these reasons overlap with the usual ones described in defense of pseudonymity and some are relatively unique to my own personal decisions on reasons that are both personal and professional.
Some reasons that I have for being a pseudonymous blogger are entirely related to making my blogging more effective in terms of what I want to do.
In what is now over seven years engaging in the blogosphere there is one issue that has brought me to do the most unsolicited, tut-tutting, pseudofatherly advice to bloggers via nonpublic communication methods.
Never assume your pseudonym is iron clad protection against being identified by people that matter to you. Ever. Blog accordingly.
My advice stems from my occasional coursework in human cognitive psychology. It shouldn’t surprise anyone but apparently it is not at the forefront of everyone’s mind (more on this in a second). The brain is a wonderfully synthetic organ that permits the linking of seemingly unconnected facts and experiences into a sometimes brilliant whole. It is fantastic at taking seemingly limited, low bandwith, pixellated information and creating a detailed picture. What this understanding means for pseuds is that you cannot help but leave breadcrumbs as to your identity. You blog because you want to talk about things that are important to you. Good blogging is infused with the personal perspective and the personal anecdote. One can’t help but assert some aspects of ones authoritah! (more on this below) in making an argument. Categorical interests tend to set a context.
Most importantly these random details and contexts permit the Reader to rule out many of the obvious suspects for whom you might be.
Next, I turn to the question of voice. If you are doing blogging right (IMNSHO), you are infusing your writing with a defined voice. Usually, that is your voice and sounds one heck of a lot like the things that you usually say in real life. After all, these are matters that are important to you or you wouldn’t be blogging. While there is no particular reason a complete stranger should recognize your voice, I hold it to be self-evident that your friends and colleagues will. My assumption has always been that if anyone who knows me runs across my blog and reads more than about two posts, they will know it is me. With very little doubt.
With that said, pseudonymity still works. Determining the identity of a given pseudonymous person on the internet still requires a bit of work, if one is not fortuitously connected to that person in real life. Depending on the various categories of personal information available, there may be many people who could be the blogger in question. This will vary tremendously depending on the number of the tiny bits of information one curious pseud-buster has available to them. One of the most important barriers to detection is therefore the avoidance of direct linking of a real name to a pseudonym in a place that is easily Google-able.
Due to these and other factors, maintaining the relative security/secrecy of ones pseudonym depends on the community. It depends first and foremost on the community not to put the identification of a pseud’s real name with their pseudonymous person in any digital format that can be Googled and/or linked. This is a relatively easy distinction.
Integrity of pseuds also depends on the community minimizing the extent to which it provides, amplifies and broadcasts the tiny bits of information that identify the blogger. This, my friends, is the tricky bit.
A blogger may have provided some detail of their person, identity or life many years ago in a random post which a given Reader remembers. Generally speaking, if a blogger talks about something on blog, well this is fair-ish game. If I let you in on a detail of my life and leave it on the blog, I certainly can’t blame anyone else for knowing this detail. And yet. A pseudonymous blogger may not wish the details critical to divining his or her identity to be repeatedly mentioned, in context, over and over for all and sundry to assess. But we exist in a community. We make friendships that depend on personal details in many cases. We make connections with Readers that are based on those tiny details and assumptions about our past and present. We embrace granfalloon. This works at cross-purposes with the integrity of the pseudonym. And so it depends on the community to uphold the pseudonym veil.
One defense I make for people who interact with pseudonymous persons and inadvertently make comments that would tend to out the pseud is a caution for those who are themselves pseudonymous. In many cases where a person identifies the real life identity of a pseudonymous blogger, it consequentially becomes unimaginable that this person is really trying too hard to be pseudonymous. As I said, if a person who knows me well runs across the blog, they are going to be thinking that it sounds so much like him that there is no possible WAY he is trying to be secret about it. Others who put the several obvious clues together, see that a pseud repeatedly mentions such clues and likewise conclude that it is an open secret of the not-very-secret variety.
The trouble is, it is very difficult for such people to remember that this is not the case for everyone and the goal is to not facilitate trivial identification. It is also difficult for people to remember that there are certain details that one does NOT ever cop to on the blog. It is difficult to remember that just one extra detail may narrow down the suspect from a group of six to an obvious one.
It is difficult for the well-intentioned internet friend to remember that a pseudonymous blogger is constantly adding new Readers and that they are not all aware of personal detail.
It is also difficult for the well-intentioned interlocutor to remember the possible harm that might be created by mistakenly linking a pseud to the wrong person- either because of direct accusation or because of mentioning details that might point in the wrong direction. There have been several cases brought to my attention in which it was clear that someone thought “Drugmonkey” was some other scientific peer of mine. This is, given my comments and tone about several serious things in science, not fair to them.
So….about me.
One reason that is a mainstay of my pseudonym is my understanding of the way that one’s personal authoritah! within science can make one lazy when it comes to arguing about the conduct of science. Michael Eisen has made the case for this in an excellent post. I like rambunctious discussion and being called out on the stupid stuff I say on the blog. I value being called out on my privilege. While I consider myself to be no great shakes in the professional arena, it is assy in the extreme not to recognize that my role places me in a position of power relative to others. Some of whom are my readers. There are grad students, postdocs, junior faculty, my lateral peers and even graybeards from my field that interact with me online. People who might hesitate to say something for fear my role as a paper or grant reviewer, potential mentor, associate editor, casual peer-recommender or letter writer may be contaminated by some personal pique over online interactions. See Dr Isis’ excellent post for a reality check on this fear.
A related reason lies in the disconnect between my prescriptive comments about the way this career business should go, my descriptive comments and how I might behave within my sphere of professional obligations. Especially at the start of my blogging, I was worried that I would be compromising the mission of the NIH were I to be directly linked to my blog comments; this had to do with grant review. It would be very easy to conclude that I was pursuing a grant review agenda that was entirely at odds with the charge given us by the CSR. I happen to think that I do a pretty good job of doing the work expected of me in navigating the provision of personal expertise for which I was selected within the instructions and obligations of the formal review process and the cultural expectations of a study section. And every reveiwer has biases. Unfortunately the CSR/NIH is in the business of pretending individual biases do not exist in study section and therefore the admission on the part of a reviewer would be a detriment to what they are trying to do. So this was an issue.
Another reason has to do with insane, theologically motivated opponents of animal research. As you know, we have several colleagues in the neurosciences that have been under siege in their homes for years now. I’ll let you do the math on that one.
I have a spouse. At times, this blog ventures into territory in which people want to know a lot about said spouse and our domestic arrangements. I try not to make decisions and to take actions that directly involve other people’s beeswax without their explicit permission. This is no different.
Now, one of the more interesting issues to distill out of the foregoing comments is that a pseudonymous identity can be misleading. Obviously there are going to be people synthesizing the bits of information and the statements and comments made to come up to a wrong impression. I mentioned misidentification of an individual above. But there is also the misidentification of various personal and professional characteristics. And this misidentification can be viewed as the type of dishonesty that is often used to argue why pseudonymous participants on the internet are horrible and evil.
One specific example has to do with a couple of my friends on the Twittahs. Who have taken to engaging in the sort of tangentially-outing behavior that I describe above as possibly coming from a place that does not include active malice. In this particular case it was by way of referring (inaccurately as it happens) to the number of R01 grants on which I serve as PI. The reason for doing so was because these individuals (or at least one of them) has the strong impression that my comments on the NIH grant game substantially misrepresent this fact about my career. In a way that somehow unfairly benefits my pseudonym. It is not clear to me whether the objection was to the force of my arguments or the appreciation the community has for my comments, these being the two sources of currency I can think of.
In a sense these are mind boggling accusations for anyone who has read my blog over any period of time. I make it pretty clear what my job category is, what my perception of “what it takes” is, my general type of research and approximate depth in the career etc. I also mention repeatedly how grateful I am for both my relative success within the NIH system and to the taxpayers for their ongoing support. All of these should give anyone who has a half a clue about this business some idea of where I stand. Apparently, however, it is possible that my Twitter persona creates an entirely different view of where I stand and therefore the persona created by the blogger seems….different. Somehow.
Obviously I am only partially responsible for the perceptions that I create. And there are people who jump to some pretty far fetched conclusions in their desire to undermine me, as opposed to my arguments themselves.
I think, on more sober reflection, that this anecdote underscores both my reasons for mounting my arguments from a position not directly tied to my status in science/academia and my comments above about the community involvement in maintaining pseudonym integrity.
I end with one of my themes for the year. I ask the outer of pseuds and the arguer against psueds:
What’s the end game here?
As a blowhard on the internet is finding out this week, outing a pseudonymous blogger doesn’t injure this person’s standing, authoritah! or arguments. It doesn’t reduce the size of the persons’ internet platform for advancing a cause or, most likely, interfere with the real life career. If anything, it enhanced all of these things! And said blowhard clearly injured his own real-life standing with his petulance.
Communities have behavioral standards. They tend to be opt-in. On the internet, there is very little enforcement of the rules. So anyone is free to be any sort of ass that they desire. We should all recognize this. This corner of the internet inhabited by academics, and scientists in particular, is most assuredly a community, however. So if you choose to be an ass, the community is going to tell you so. We should all recognize this. All of us are going to be the ass at times. If you aren’t, you aren’t really saying anything of importance. We can control, however, the scope of our assiness. And the response we have when told we are being an ass about a particular topic. We should all recognize this.
What about diversity in the R37/MERIT deals, NIH?
January 17, 2014
The R37/MERIT award is an interesting beast in NIH-land. It is typically (exclusively?) awarded upon a successful competing continuation (now called renewal) R01 application. Program then decides in some cases to extend the interval of non-competition for another 5 years*. This, my friends, is person-not-project based funding.
The R37 is a really good gig….if you can get it.
So, given that I’m blogging about award disparity this week….I took a look at the R37s currently on the books for one of my favorite ICs.
There are 25 of them.
The PIs include
1 transgender PI.
4 female PIs
0 East Asian / East Asian-American PIs (that I could detect)
3 South Asian / South Asian-American PIs (that I could detect)
0 SubSaharan African / African-American PIs (that I could detect)
0 Latino PIs (that I could detect)
hmmm, not that strong of a job. How about another of my favorite ICs?
23 awards (Interesting because this IC is half the size of the above-mentioned one)
12 female PIs.
0 East Asian / East Asian-American PIs (that I could detect)
1-2 South Asian / South Asian-American PIs (that I could detect)
0 SubSaharan African / African-American PIs (that I could detect)
3-4 Latino PIs (that I could detect)
way better on the sex distribution. Whether this number of R37s reflects more than average good-old-folks clubbery or the above represents less than average I don’t know. 25 at another large IC close to my interests. 95ish (I didn’t parse for supplements) at another. Only 45ish at NCI. Clearly a big range relative to IC size.
Both of these are doing really poorly on East Asian/ Asian-American and African-American PIs. The first is pretty pathetic on Latino PIs as well.
On the other hand, good old white guys with grey hair or receding hairlines are doing quite well in the R37 stakes.
How are your favorite ICs doing, Dear Reader?
__
*The way I hear it. I have heard rumor that these can go beyond a total of 10 years of R37 but I’m not sure on that.
In a conversation on the twitts:
@drugmonkeyblog @RockTalking I’m an out gay grad student and I have never, to my knowledge, met an LGBT PI. is it the numbers or visibility?
Yeah, that sucks.
What would the NIH do if it wanted to make things really hard for Asian and Black PIs to get funded?
January 17, 2014
The takeaway message from the report of Ginther and colleagues (2011) on Race, Ethnicity and NIH Research Awards can be summed up by this passage from the end of the article:
Applications from black and Asian investigators were significantly less likely to receive R01 funding compared with whites for grants submitted once or twice. For grants submitted three or more times, we found no significant difference in award probability between blacks and whites; however, Asians remained almost 4 percentage points less likely to receive an R01 award (P < .05). Together, these data indicate that black and Asian investigators are less likely to be awarded an R01 on the first or second attempt, blacks and Hispanics are less likely to resubmit a revised application, and black investigators that do resubmit have to do so more often to receive an award.
Recall that these data reflect applications received for Fiscal Years 2000 to 2006.
Interestingly, we were just discussing the most recent funding data from the NIH with a particular focus on the triaged applications. A comment on the Rock Talk blog of the OER at NIH was key.
I received a table of data covering A0 R01s received between FY 2010 and FY2012 (ARRA funds and solicited applications were excluded). Overall at NIH, 2.3% of new R01s that were “not scored” as A0s were funded as A1s (range at different ICs was 0.0% to 8.4%), and 8.7% of renewals that were unscored as A0s were funded as A1s (range 0.0% to 25.7%).
I noted the following for a key distinction between new and competing-continuation applications.
The mean and selected ICs I checked tell the same tale, i.e., that Type 2 apps have a much better shot at getting funded after triage on the A0. NIDA is actually pretty extreme from what I can tell- 2.8% versus 15.2%. So if there is a difference in the A1 resubmission rate for Type 1 and Type 2 (and I bet Type 2 apps that get triaged on A0 are much more likely to be amended and resubmitted) apps, the above analysis doesn’t move the relative disadvantage around all that much. However for NIAAA the Type 1 and Type 2 numbers are closer- 4.7% versus 9.8%. So for NIAAA supplicants, a halving of the resubmission rate for Type 1 might bring the odds for Type 1 and Type 2 much closer.
So look. If you were going to try to really screw over some category of investigators you would make sure they were more likely to be triaged and then make it really unlikely that a triaged application could be revised into the fundable range. You could stoke this by giving an extra boost to triaged applications that had already been funded for a prior interval….because your process has already screened your target population to decrease representation in the first place. It’s a feed-forward acceleration.
What else could you do? Oh yes. About those revisions, poorer chances on the first 1-2 attempts and the need for Asian and black PIs to submit more often to get funded. Hey I know, you could prevent everybody from submitting too many revised versions of the grant! That would provide another amplification of the screening procedure.
So yeah. The NIH halved the number of permitted revisions to previously unfunded applications for those submitted after January 25, 2009.
Think we’re ever going to see an extension of the Ginther analysis to applications submitted from FY2007 onward? I mean, we’re seeing evidence in this time of pronounced budgetary grimness that the NIH is slipping on its rather overt efforts to keep early stage investigator success rates similar to experienced investigators’ and to keep women’s success rates similar to mens’.
The odds are good that the plight of African-American and possibly even Asian/Asian-American applicants to the NIH has gotten even worse than it was for Fiscal Years 2000-2006.
DrugMonkey 