Newly funded NIH PIs

It would be fascinating if NIH did audits to search for who gets funded with their first grant by pedigree and productivity measures.

I’d want to see categorization of number of first and last author pubs. Of course. Some sort of measure of productivity in the time since being appointed to the independent investigator title. Mediated by JIF.

Then pedigree by the grant wealth and productivity of the pre-independence mentors.

I wonder if you can get away with crap productivity of you are tied into the network. And if you can overcome your Outsider status by generating a ton of pubs.

I wonder how likely a newb is to be funded as the years elapse from the time of first appointment without senior author publications.

Power in the NIH review trenches

That extensive quote from a black PI who had participated in the ECR program is sticking with me.

Insider status isn’t binary, of course. It is very fluid within the grant-funded science game. There are various spectra along multiple dimensions.

But make no mistake it is real. And Insider status is advantageous. It can be make-or-break crucial to a career at many stages.

I’m thinking about the benefits of being a full reviewer with occasional/repeated ad hoc status or full membership.

One of those benefits is that other reviewers in SEPs or closely related panels are less likely to mess with you.

Less likely.

It isn’t any sort of quid pro quo guarantee. Of course not. But I guarantee that a reviewer who thinks this PI might be reviewing her own proposal in the near future has a bias. A review cant. An alerting response. Whatever.

It is different. And, I would submit, generally to the favor of the applicant that possesses this Mutually Assured Destruction power.

The Ginther finding arose from a thousand cuts, I argue. This is possibly one of them.