The 3 Toughest Obstacles to a Successful NIH R01 Resubmission
While it’s important to talk about the grant writing process, it’s just as important to consider the obstacles that get in your way on the review side of things.
Over the years, I’ve observed some common tendencies. Some of these are self-sabotaging behaviors that can really prevent you from being successful. The good news is that these obstacles are easily avoidable.
Facing Your Worries and Anxieties
I know this probably isn’t where you want to start, but I see this from applicants all the time who get their scores back and start to worry. It’s clear you didn’t get a fundable score, or maybe the grant wasn’t even discussed. Understandably, not getting the results you expected or hoped for generates a lot of worry.
While the worry is natural, I don’t want you to let the worry and anxiety dictate your next steps because—please trust me here—that only ends up causing you more trouble and it keeps you from writing a fundable grant.
For example, if you decide to turn your resubmission around as quickly as possible so you don’t lose momentum, the rush to resubmit can lead you to skip over important critiques from your summary statement, which will put you back in the exact same place during your next peer review.
Or, if your anxiety is driving you to please each of your reviewers (even when they contradict each other), this could lead you to cobble together a sort of Frankenstein submission that tries to be everything to everyone without considering what’s right for the project that you’re proposing and where you’re headed as a scientist. This can make your application seem disjointed and confusing, and ultimately even less appealing to your reviewers than your original submission.
If you let your worry drive your decision-making, you can end up hurting yourself and getting into more trouble, making it more difficult than it already is to get funded.
That said, I never want to diminish how real your anxiety is. Still, I do want you to pay attention to how it influences your decision-making because if all you did was stop and ask yourself, “Am I resubmitting this next cycle because I’m worried or because I know that I’ll be ready,” you can make a career-changing decision—for good or worse.
Are You Rushing Your Resubmission?
Here’s an easy way to know if you are rushing your resubmission: if you plan to automatically submit in the next cycle, come hell or high water without making a plan and figuring out how long it’s going to take for you to do a good job.
If this is your mindset, yes, you are rushing your resubmission.
The automatic assumption is you have to submit the next cycle so you can keep the momentum going and prevent delaying your funding opportunity. But I want you to consider this:
By rushing, you might actually be delaying your funding instead of the other way around. If you’re focusing on truly improving your grant, sometimes it takes longer than you want it to take. Though it may take a bit longer, the time and effort it takes to do that ends up paying off in the long run rather than the short term.
This idea of keeping up the momentum and rushing your resubmission isn’t completely your fault. It’s more aligned with the culture around resubmissions. There’s this idea that you just keep the ball rolling. You get your results and turn it around as quickly as you can to keep your hat in the ring. This mindset is unfortunate because, too often, it actually ends up harming your chances of funding instead of improving them.
Or this could be the result of institutional pressures - you might be required to demonstrate that you’re ‘trying’ by submitting a grant each cycle (I have a *lot* of thoughts about this kind of policy, but for now I’ll just say that it’s deeply misguided).
As someone who has helped dozens of early career researchers with their resubmissions, I can tell that the most successful PIs are the ones who wait until they’re truly ready to resubmit. They are willing to skip a cycle to give enough time to look closely at how they’re going to address each and every critique, whether that’s in terms of generating more data or publishing a few more articles in peer-reviewed journals.
That can also include thinking about how they can better justify their own decisions. All of these steps will help them write a stronger resubmission that leads to the exact results they are looking for.
Are You Sticking With Your Plan? (Do You Even Have A Plan?)
When you don’t create a resubmission plan, or you do create one but you don’t stick with it, to me that’s a pretty good sign that you don’t have enough time to do a good job. More specifically, though, it’s a sign that you are not protecting your time in an intentional way.
If you don’t create a plan, you don’t actually know how long it’s going to take for you to address your comments from reviewers. You might have a loose plan, but until you actually bring some specificity into view and make each step concrete, you’re really just winging it.
If you don’t try to fit a resubmission plan into your current schedule, you won’t know how realistic or unrealistic your timing actually is. This means there’s a greater chance that you'll discover really late in the game that you don't have enough time to do a good job.
Because you’re so committed to submitting to that particular deadline, you miss the fact that it’s impossible to get everything done in time to address all of those critiques. Still, you go for it anyway, leading to a not-so-great resubmission (and a not-so-great score).
Then you’re back at square one.
Overcoming These Three Obstacles
What I'm really encouraging you to do here is to pause, take a deep breath, assess the situation, assess the information that you have available to you, assess what you're seeing in your summary statement, and then sit down and actually make a resubmission plan.
Ask yourself:
How am I going to do this?
How much time am I estimating that it's going to take me?
Is it actually realistic for me to resubmit for the next cycle?
Do I need to give it a few extra months to do a really good job?
These time-focused questions are going to help you see that taking a few extra months to do a really good job can actually save you potentially years in that resubmission cycle.
You can avoid getting stuck on the treadmill where you’re just rushing and resubmitting every time and not really learning anything from the summary statements by taking the time to pause, create a plan, and figure out how you’re going to address the reviewer comments and improve your grantsmanship at the same time.
Doing this can ultimately shorten the time that it takes you to get a funded grant and move closer to making your research project a reality.
If you found this information helpful and you want to learn even more about improving your NIH R01 resubmission, the fastest 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 to help you write a stronger NIH grant.