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
Last updated February 09, 2005