Your Grant in Review: Follow the Reviewers’ Style Guide

The NIH grant application has a tremendous amount of room for stylistic choice. No, I’m not talking about Georgia font again, nor your points-leaving choice to cite your references with numbers instead of author-date.

Within the dictated structure of Aims, Significance, Innovation, etc, there is a lot of freedom.

Where do I put the Preliminary Data now that there is no defined section? What comes first in the Approach- Aim 1? The Timeline? A bunch of additional rationale/background? Do you start every Aim with a brief Rationale and then list a bunch of Experiments? Which methods are “general” enough to put them at the end of Aim 3?

Do I include Future Directions?

What about discussion of Possible Pitfalls and Alternate Considerations and all that jazz?

Is the “Interpretation” for each Aim supposed to be an extensive tretise on results that you don’t even have yet?

In all of this there is one certainty.

Ideally you are submitting multiple applications to a single study section over time. If not that, then you are likely submitting a revised version of an application that was not funded to the same study section that reviewed it in the first place. Study sections tend to have an evolved and transmissible culture that changes only slowly. There is a tendency for review to focus (overfocus, but there you have it) on certain structural expectations, in part as a way to be fair* to all the applications. There is a tendency for the study section to be the most comfortable with certain of these optional, stylistic features of a grant application included in juuuust the way that they expect.

So, and here is the certainty, if a summary statement suggests your application is deficient in one of these stylistic manners just suck it up and change your applications to that particular study section accordingly.

Is a Timeline silly when you’ve laid out a very simple and time-estimated set of experiments in a linear organization throughout the Aims? Perhaps. Is it idiotic to talk about alternatives when you conduct rapid, vertically ascending eleventy science and everything you propose right now is obsolete by the time Year 2 funds? Likely. Why do you need to lead the reviewers by the hand when your Rationale and experimental descriptions make it clear how the hypothesis will be tested and what it would mean? Because.

So when your summary statement suggests a stylistic variant that you wouldn’t otherwise prefer…just do it.
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Additional Your Grant in Review posts.

*If the section has beaten up several apps because they did not appropriately discuss the Possible Pitfalls, or include Future Directions, well, they have to do it for all the apps. So the tendency goes anyway.