Greetings Colleagues, To say the least, the last two years have been incredibly challenging for everyone. Although it has recently felt like the worst of the pandemic may be behind us, the rapid emergence of the Omicron variant has cast some doubt on that. Between March 10, 2020, and February 26, 2021, every one of our seminar and workshop programs was held virtually. Since then, a number of research institutions and universities have returned to sponsoring our programs in person, while others have continued to opt for the virtual format. Given current circumstances, we are providing an update ..read more

GWSW has recently updated both the NIH and NSF versions of The Grant Application Writer’s Workbook.  Here are the details:  2020 National Institutes of Health (NIH) Version Updated: The May 2020 NIH version of our workbook, The Grant Application Writer’s Workbook, has been updated to comply with the NIH SF424 FORMS-F application package for grant applications due on or after May 25, 2020. Some of the changes are: • Streamlined approach to finding an appropriate Program Officer and Study Section • Updates to the general information on the purpose of common grant mechanisms • Addition ..read more

Submitting a maximally reviewer friendly grant application is essential to developing advocacy among the assigned reviewers of your proposal. Document legibility is central to that and refers to the ease with which a reader can distinguish one character from another in a body of text. Legibility involves many factors, such as font type, line spacing, hyphenation, and text alignment. This blog post concentrates on text alignment, and future posts are planned to address other tips to make your proposal reviewer friendly. Text alignment refers to the setting of text flow or image placement in rel ..read more

Owning your authoritative scientific “voice” is critical for ensuring that reviewers see you as a knowledgeable, credible expert prepared to undertake the work proposed in the application. When providing background information and describing the findings of other investigators, many applicants use informal, conversational phrases and sentence structure that inadvertently undercut their “voices,” and coincidentally, waste precious space. Consider the following sentence (emphasis added): It has long been appreciated that inadequate maternal nutrition leading to a compromised pregnancy increases ..read more

Winning a major grant by a first-time/inexperienced applicant is a daunting task that has become substantially more challenging recently due to “hypercompetition” for research funding. Indeed, with success rates for grants hovering around 10-20% across a range of different funding agencies, reviewers of grant proposals are not looking for reasons to recommend applications for funding. Rather, reviewers are looking for reasons to turn down the overwhelming majority of proposals they’ve been assigned to review. To succeed, an applicant must have both a compelling idea for a grant and the grantsm ..read more

Young/junior/early career investigators attending one of our Write Winning Grant Proposals seminars frequently ask whether teaming up with senior/established investigators on a grant application will increase their chances of meriting an independent grant award. The answer is that it may or may not be helpful, depending upon why and how a senior investigator is included as a collaborator. The only justifiable reason for including a collaborator on a grant proposal – irrespective of career stage – is to provide expertise that the principal investigator (PI) lacks and yet is necessary to su ..read more

Today’s blog is intended to help authors avoid common mistakes that can diminish the impact, or prompt outright rejection, of a research manuscript. Weak Problem Statement in the Introduction. If, after reading your manuscript’s Introduction, reviewers lack a clear understanding of why you conducted your research, your manuscript is likely to be rejected. Similarly, if your manuscript is published without a clearly written Problem Statement, its impact on the target audience will be markedly reduced. To avoid this, begin the Introduction with a concise, focused Literature Review that conc ..read more

Reviewer Fatigue implies that an Editor’s Request to Review a manuscript is more likely to be ignored or declined today than it would have been 10-15 years ago. Although many Editorials address concerns about Reviewer Fatigue (e.g., Arns, M. Nature, 2014), data supporting this claim are sparse in the Biomedical Literature. Publications in other fields, however, indicate that Reviewer Fatigue is real (Fox, CW, et al Research Integrity and Peer-Review, 2017;  Warne, V. Learned Publishing, 2016.) The potential hazard of Reviewer Fatigue is that it can both delay publication and reduce the qu ..read more

When I was a graduate student, one particular research group caught my attention because they seemed to publish a manuscript at least monthly. It didn’t take long, however, for me to appreciate that all of their publications were very similar; it was only the Results Section that changed substantively from one publication to the next. At a time when writing research manuscripts intimidated me, I realized how easy preparing new manuscripts was for this group. Some minor wordsmithing of one of their previously published Introductions and Discussions was required. The Methods section could be com ..read more

At virtually every Biomedical Publication Seminar I present, attendees line up during breaks to seek my input on conflicts they are currently facing regarding authorship. Thus, if you find yourself struggling to decide who should or shouldn’t be included as an author of a manuscript, you’re not alone. Vera-Badillo et al. (Eur J Cancer, 2016) recently investigated the issue of Honorary and Ghost Authors of manuscripts describing results of randomized clinical trials, and found the problem to be pervasive. Honorary Authors, defined as authors who do not meet recommended authorship criteria, were ..read more