Your Grant in Review: Scientific Premise

Scientific premise has become the latest headache of uncertainty in NIH grant crafting and review. You can tell because the NIH keeps having to issue clarifications about what it is, and is not. The latest is from Office of Extramural Research honcho Mike Lauer at his blog:

Clarifying what is meant by scientific premise
Scientific premise refers to the rigor of the prior research being cited as key support for the research question(s). For instance, a proposal might note prior studies had inadequate sample sizes. To help both applicants and reviewers describe and assess the rigor of the prior research cited as key support for the proposal, we plan to revise application instructions and review criteria to clarify the language.

Under Significance, the applicant will be asked to describe the strengths and weaknesses in the rigor of the prior research (both published and unpublished) that serves as the key support for the proposed project. Under Approach, the applicant will be asked to describe plans to address weaknesses in the rigor of the prior research that serves as the key support for the proposed project. These revisions are planned for research and mentored career development award applications that come in for the January 25, 2019 due date and beyond. Be on the lookout for guide notices.

My first thought was…great. Fan-friggin-tastic.

You are going to be asked to be more pointed about how the prior research all sucks. No more just saying things about too few studies, variances between different related findings or a pablum offer that it needs more research. Oh no. You are going to have to call papers out for inadequate sample size, poor design, bad interpretation, using the wrong parameters or reagents or, pertinent to a recent twitter discussion, running their behavioral studies in the inactive part of the rodent daily cycle.

Now I don’t know about all of y’all, but the study sections that review my grants have a tendency to be populated with authors of papers that I cite. Or by their academic progeny or mentors. Or perhaps their tight science homies that they organize symposia and conferences with. Or at the very least their subfield collective peeps that all use the same flawed methods/approaches.

The SABV requirement has, quite frankly, been bad ENOUGH on this score. I really don’t need this extra NIH requirement to be even more pointed about the limitations of prior literature that we propose to set about addressing with more studies.