Improve Your NIH R01 Score with Effective Use of Preliminary Data
Unless you are one of the unicorns and your grant gets funding the first time around, there’s a good chance your main focus is going to be refining your NIH R01 submission.
Whether you’re resubmitting an A1 or an A0, or this is your third or fifth time, there are ways that you can improve your score that relate directly to your use of preliminary data.
What does that actually look like?
Giving Yourself Time
One of the greatest errors I see in resubmissions is that researchers haven’t given themselves sufficient time to actually address the critiques in their summary statements that are related to generating more preliminary data.
They’re so worried about resubmitting on the next cycle that they don’t give themselves enough time to do what is necessary to generate and analyze more preliminary data in response to the reviewer critiques.
If you don’t agree with your reviewers that you need more preliminary data, you still have to take time and provide a strong justification for your stance while better explaining why what you have already included is sufficient.
Structuring Your Resubmission
The structure of your R01 deserves a lot more attention than what early career researchers usually give it. The way that NIH recommends and the way I help my clients structure their applications is to lay things out in a clear and logical manner for reviewers so they can easily get on board at each level of detail.
I mention each level because one of the things you are achieving with your grant application is moving from broad to specific. You begin at a really high level, and as you move further into your application, you become more detailed.
For instance, your significance section is going to be super broad. Since this is where you explain why this research needs to be done, you get the opportunity to show the larger scientific problem your research is situated in and the gap in knowledge you are trying to fill.
If you take a deeper look into this section, what you’re actually doing is synthesizing the literature to identify what we already know about this larger problem and what we don’t know. Using that already published information, you want to make sure you are describing the gaps.
This opening section is going to provide you with a solid foundation because it is deeply rooted in the literature.
Revisiting Your Summary Statement
With this focus on elevating your resubmission, you want to review your summary statement and dial in on what your reviewers said about the scientific premise of what you’re doing. So don’t focus exclusively on what they’re saying in the approach section, because you might miss some important critiques elsewhere
As you’re making plans for how to improve, given the information from your summary statement, my recommendation for your preliminary data is to move it up and talk about how it informs the development of your aims.
Even if you don’t follow this advice, be sure to not focus solely on what reviewers say about your approach because you can learn a lot about what the critiques are from your significance section in terms of whether they're buying your argument for the scientific premise of your research or not.
Finalizing Your Argument
As you’re clearing up your argument for the scientific premise, it opens the door for you to shore up the argument for how you arrived at your gap in knowledge. More specifically, how you arrive at your central hypothesis or main research question.
Providing this clarity is going to require solid preliminary data. In doing this you have some early promising evidence that is broad and general. This gives you the space in your aims to go into more depth, though still at a high level, as to how you’re going to fill this gap in knowledge.
So it’s really about informing the objective of your aims or the purpose of each of your aims. Then, in your approach section, you can get into all the details in terms of the experimental approach you are going to take.
Making the Best Use Of Your Summary Statement
There’s a lot of information in the critiques of your significance and approach sections around how you can do better in explaining how you’ve gotten to where you are, why you’ve designed things in the way you have, and showing your overall thinking for this grant proposal.
Whether you have the opportunity to submit an introduction to the resubmission page, you are submitting a new grant, or it’s your fifth kick at the can, there’s a lot you can learn from your summary statement.
It will detail how you can lean on your preliminary data to create a stronger argument for your premise and how to better justify why you’re doing what you’re doing. While there may be more that’s required to convince your reviewers about the feasibility of your proposal, you don’t have to agree, but you do have to further justify why what you included is more than enough.
If you found this information about preliminary data helpful and you want to learn even more about improving your NIH R01, the best way to do that is to sign up for our free resource library. Inside the free resource library, there are lots of tools and tutorials on different aspects of NIH grant writing that will help you write a stronger application.