Getting Your NIH R01 Funded: What Reviewers Look For
This goes without saying, but I’ll say it anyway: to get your R01 funded, you need a great research idea with a solid scientific premise.
But if that were good enough to get your R01 funded, the success rate at NIH would be a measly 20%, right? While a good research idea gets your foot in the door, it doesn’t guarantee funding.
So what can you do to secure funding, especially if you already checked the box for a great research idea?
Well, the problem actually begins with those boxes you love checking off. Let’s go deeper than what you think about NIH grant writing and see it for what it really is.
Writing a Grant Is An Opportunity to Prepare in Advance
Let’s get this out of the way now. Grant writing is not a hurdle—it’s an important part of the research process. If you’re able to look through a different lens, you’ll see that writing a grant actually serves as a crucial way to solidify your thinking in advance. It allows you to plan your project before you execute it—it allows you to get really clear about what you’re doing and why.
Clarity is one of the hardest parts to nail in a grant application. Especially if you’re relatively new to big research project grants or a specific grant mechanism, it’s hard to remember that your reviewers can’t read your mind. You either haven’t thought something through, or you haven’t clarified your process enough so that when reviewers read it, there’s no confusion or misunderstanding about your proposal’s “what” and “why.”
That’s the true value of grant writing. It’s a real opportunity to get clear on why your research idea needs to get done and how your work is going to help push the field forward.
Another significant opportunity grant writing provides is the chance to design your research in a way that makes sure you’re meeting the objectives you set out to achieve. You’d be surprised at the number of applications I see that either don’t have a clear objective or do have an objective but their study design won’t actually achieve that objective.
The last opportunity I’ll touch on is the room to create a budget that you can refer to when you’re getting your project off the ground. This is super helpful because the last thing you want to worry about when you finally get funded is how you are going to allocate all of that money.
To sum it up, grant writing forces you to think about every part of your research in advance of actually doing the work instead of figuring things out on the fly, which is a serious time waster.
What Reviewers Look For in Your NIH R01
When considering your reviewers, there are two scoring categories you want to think of: implicit and explicit.
The explicit is obvious. These are your criterion scores in your R01. Your significance, investigator, approach, innovation and environment. The reviewers are going to look at these criteria closely and assess them as they read your application.
The implicit is less obvious. This speaks more to the big picture idea of your proposal.
These are the questions every reviewer asks themselves when they read your grant. The way I think about it is that these implicit scoring criteria are really what drive that overall impact score. Remember, your overall impact score is not the average of your criterion score. It’s completely separate.
When you think about it in this way, you get a clearer picture of the scoring process and understand exactly what your reviewers are looking for to develop your overall impact score.
In this implicit scoring, reviewers will ask three questions.
Is this research worth doing?
Is this team the right team to be doing the work?
And is this project feasible?
Let’s take a brief look at each one.
Answering Three Implicit Questions That NIH Reviewers Are Asking
Whether your research is worth doing is more than the significance and impact of your research. It’s really expressing why your research matters and why it matters now.
If you can answer this question really well, you can generate excitement in your reviewers, which will bring you one step closer to having their support in getting your R01 funded.
The second question is all about your support team and their trustworthiness. You have pointed to your success outcomes, so reviewers want to be reassured that you have the right team to execute your plan and make these outcomes a reality.
Lastly, they want to know about your project feasibility. This is where you answer questions about your approach to executing the research you designed. Going a step further, you want to explain the feasibility from a scientific premise perspective.
This entails explaining how your thinking led you to this place, where this is how you have designed what you’ve designed, and how you generated your hypothesis. You want to connect the science with your predicted outcomes so that your reviewers can clearly connect the dots instead of trying to figure it out on their own…which is always a red flag.
How To Get NIH Funding
If you can successfully answer these three implicit reviewer questions, it’s going to help reviewers understand why this project is to be recommended for funding in the next grant cycle.
It’s not just having a great research idea. It’s about communicating the value of your research and making sure that reviewers can review your proposal and have complete confidence you can do what you say you’re going to do and that you have the right team around you to be able to pull it off.
Get Help Writing Your Next NIH Grant
If you found this helpful, I encourage you to sign up for our free resource library. The content inside will help you answer the explicit and implicit questions your reviewers have and help you write stronger NIH grants.