Common Mistakes in NIH Applications

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The five review criteria for most NIH grant applications are:

Significance, approach, innovation, investigator, and environment.

Innovation is not necessary, but the results should have compelling significance.

Common Mistakes:

Problems with significance:

• Not significant nor exciting nor new research
• Lack of compelling rationale
• Incremental and low impact research

Problems with specific aims:

• Too ambitious, too much work proposed
• Unfocused aims, unclear goals
• Limited aims and uncertain future directions

Problems with experimental approach:

• Too much unnecessary experimental detail
• Not enough detail on approaches, especially untested ones
• Not enough preliminary data to establish feasibility
• Feasibility of each aim not shown
• Little or no expertise with approach
• Lack of appropriate controls
• Not directly testing hypothesis
• Correlative or descriptive data
• Experiments not directed towards mechanisms
• No discussion of alternative models or hypotheses
• No discussion of potential pitfalls
• No discussion of interpretation of data

Problems with investigator:

• No demonstration of expertise or publications in approaches
• Low productivity, few recent papers
• No collaborators recruited or no letters from collaborators

Problems with environment:

• Little demonstration of institutional support
• Little or no start up package or necessary equipment