Learn from the mistakes of others

How to apply for a grant and not anger the experts

Sergey Moshkovsky, "Biomolecule"

Applying for a grant is always akin to a lottery
Illustrations by Alyona Belyakova

During the examination of grant applications to the Russian foundations for the support of fundamental science, I drew attention to the repeated mistakes in the preparation of such projects, which often lead to their loss in the competition. The small explanations prepared by me from my own experience, of course, will not generate new scientific ideas, but they will help to put them in the form that the experts of the foundations will perceive better.

It so happened that over the past 2-3 years I have reviewed about one hundred and fifty applications for grants from the Russian Foundation for Basic Research and the Russian Academy of Sciences, the two main Russian foundations for supporting fundamental research in the field of natural sciences. For the RFBR, while working in scientific councils for some competitions, I also looked through the annotations of more than 300 applications for grants in fundamental medicine. The system of funds is not without drawbacks, however, if you work in Russia, in a state scientific institution, receiving a grant from these funds is almost the only way to gain relative independence and conduct research that you yourself have conceived.

Why am I preparing this text? Despite the numerous explanations of the participants in the process, applications submitted from young (and not so young) researchers contain repeated errors that force experts to lower their estimates on certain characteristics of applications. As a result, potential winners with sufficiently bright ideas, but insufficiently developed applications, lose the competition to simpler, sometimes trivial in thought, but correctly designed projects.

In this article I will share my experience of reviewing applications in biological and medical sciences. I hope my suggestions will help researchers improve their applications and compete more successfully on the battlefield for grants. I will note that I speak informally, out of connection with the position of other reviewers and representatives of foundations. I myself am not very successful in winning grants – almost a shoemaker without boots – nevertheless, I will share my feelings from the other side of this rather sluggish grant river.

How grants are evaluated

First, the conditions of the competition are determined. They include thematic, financial (that is, the amount of money for the project) and sometimes age restrictions, requirements for the composition of teams and the like. In international projects, requirements for a foreign team are added. Now money is being given out on them "bilaterally" – the corresponding parts of the joint application are independently financed by Russian and foreign funds.

Before the deadline, projects are submitted to the created online application system, and their paper versions are sent to the funds. At the first stage, a very small part of the applications are removed on a formal basis – for example, due to errors in the paperwork. Then the board appointed by the foundation in advance for a specific competition or an initiative group allocated from it begins to select experts to evaluate applications. Experts are selected semi-automatically from the list of candidates by thematic areas (there are special classifiers with codes) and by keywords specified by the authors of the application. Potential reviewers – there are usually from two to five of them for each application, depending on the competition – are sent a request for access to materials in a special examination system. If the expert agrees to evaluate the project, he must do it within a certain time. The examination is paid, but rather modestly, so for those who do it, it is akin to a social burden.

For each application, the expert fills out a questionnaire developed by the foundation, which gives the sum of points, and at the end writes a review provided to the authors of the application, and also evaluates the project as a whole, approximately on a school four-point scale.

When an expert examination has been carried out on all projects submitted for the competition, the council mentioned above – usually thematic, that is, only in biology, chemistry, etc. – is assembled for a final decision. Its members, as a rule, themselves act as the most active experts. Since there are usually a lot of applications, and there is only one decisive meeting, the council usually focuses on the estimated passing score obtained by averaging the results of the examination. The passing score is obviously determined by the size of the grant and the total budget that the fund is willing to spend on this competition. The council, in fact, is necessary to consider complex cases (for example, when experts' assessments differ greatly) and then it is likely to reveal a conflict of interest. According to competitions, a small part of applications with a "semi-passable" score is usually formed, among which the council collectively selects the best and also supports. My practice shows that in 90% of cases, expert assessments converge very closely. The remaining cases just require the attention of the council members in order to decide in real time what to do with them.

Is it worth filing?

A grant application is a lot of work comparable to preparing a good publication. If you get it wrong, the chances are reduced. I recently submitted an application together with partners from the States and was amazed at how detailed and thorough the litobzor is prepared there, what quality the drawings are provided.

Therefore, before you start preparing a project, it would be good to have a vision of the project as a whole, an accurate idea of what you want to do during the execution of the project, and, of course, the time to write it. Write about what you understand and know – otherwise the experts will catch you in inaccuracy and lower your scores. Sometimes researchers underestimate expertise, having got used, for example, to work in departmental programs, where it is often necessary (as a rule, artificially!) to increase the significance of the project for success, directly promising the speedy implementation of the results. In case of guile, you will most likely be exposed, which you will be notified about in the review.

Of course, in a scientific search, you cannot be sure what result you will get in the end. But it is necessary to anticipate it at least hypothetically for the success of the project.

Therefore, submit an application on the topic in which you understand better than others, do not immerse yourself in someone else's, albeit fashionable, areas. After all, even if you win a grant, it will be very difficult to fulfill it by reacquainting yourself with some topic.

Bad trouble beginning: abstract

Abstract, abstract, abstract, if you like, is what the people responsible for appointing experts read, and with the help of information from the annotation, they choose these very experts. Thematic rubricators are also important – that is, what specific field of science your project belongs to – as well as keywords. In some grant systems, they automatically determine the repertoire of possible reviewers. The matter is in a terrible hurry, and if the abstract is not clearly drawn up, it can get to experts in a related field. The latter are not always fully oriented in the "alien" topic, they are able to overlook the merits of the project and underestimate its points. And in general they will be angry because not everyone understands. Therefore, it is very important to pay attention to these formalities, correctly assign keywords. In the project abstract, you need to write about what you want to do, and leave one phrase at the beginning for the prerequisites of the work. Otherwise, you will get what is written about in the next section.

"Cancer is a terrible disease"

There are times in the life of scientists when they need to convince officials of something. And officials, basically, understand only something simple or socially useful. You write that the study of protein with zinc fingers No. 127 will cure all patients and solve health problems for the next hundred years, and you have a chance. Many researchers, after talking with departmental programs, directly transfer their experience from them and fill in more than half of the application with arguments about the importance and necessity of the entire field. Nevertheless, the examination is carried out not by officials, but by active researchers. And if you start your text with the fact that "cancer is a terrible disease," they start to get angry. Respect the expertise. Do not explain with what frequency the disease occurs in the population, how to treat it, etc., if you want to investigate the phosphorylation of some abstract kinases in one cell line.

Try not to overdo it with the "relevance of the topic"

Even a small embellishment of the relevance of the work will not add credit points to the project's piggy bank. In addition, the abstract significance of the work does not need to fill in most of the annotation. Often I had to read an abstract in which only the last phrase – as a conclusion from the previous one – referred to what the authors still want to do. The beginning and the middle were devoted to how it is necessary, useful and important. It is better not to – there is a special place in the application, which is roughly called "the state of affairs in this area". However, it also needs to be supplied with information from which the essence of your project directly follows. If you want to study the components of an important molecular cascade associated with the development of tumors, then you need to write what is known about this cascade, and not about cancer as a whole, its epidemiology and social significance.

"ABCD/E regions of the xyZ gene are flanked by sites modified by the FegH protein"

The opposite situation happens – the authors of the application begin to write a specialized text from the start, abundantly supplying it with abbreviations and Anglicisms that rather resemble scientific jargon. Nevertheless, an easy-to-read, coherent text makes it much easier to work with the application. Dealing with the intricacies of thought, when complex sentences make up whole paragraphs, is difficult even for a specialist in your field. The specifics should not overshadow the general idea that you reflect in the application. The severity of the perception can cause criticism and a decrease in the rating of the work.

Novelty in science – not everything is unambiguous

There are sections in the grant application forms where you need to describe the scientific novelty of the research. It is quite difficult to establish it, even in modern science. Small projects often complement existing knowledge, sometimes copying the first research in this area by design. There is no need to be shy about this – today the results of experiments in almost all areas of natural sciences must be further confirmed in independent laboratories. This is especially true of medicine. The repetition of the same tests on different populations and groups of patients is a normal practice of evidence–based medical science. When describing the prerequisites of your research and its novelty, it is not necessary to hide it. Let the expert assess your awareness. This is better than trying to show that you are the first in everything, and there is a desert around you.

Novelty is a mandatory requirement for a scientific project

The Nobel Prize for half a million rubles

It is often necessary to meet with well-written and planned applications, but completely impossible if you compare the amount of work and the amount of money given out. Many grants are very modest, for example, a massive RFBR competition with the letter "a" gives out 700 thousand rubles this year. Of course, this is very small, but the upper limit of one grant is usually known in advance. Applications are submitted where the cost of some reagents exceeds the upper limit of funding several times! This is quite severely penalized when evaluating, even if a project that is excellent in all other respects is written. After all, you can't do research for the Nobel Prize for half a million rubles! It is also not necessary to mechanically transfer a lost application to another competition if the amount of grant funding varies greatly between competitions. The expert will notice this and reduce the points.

Another similar error in the description of the work is a vague description of the scope of work. For example, people write that blood plasma samples from patients with such and such a disease will be compared with samples from healthy people, but they do not indicate how many patients they will attract to the study. This is a trick, because when you don't specify anything exactly, the bribes are smooth from you. However, the expert will not approve such a work plan. Because 10 thousand patients is an article in conditional Nature, and 5 people is already a question for the project.

What should a beginner do?

When studying an application, the reserve that its authors have is evaluated. Does this mean that it is impossible to get a grant on a new topic on which this researcher has not worked before? Of course, this is not the case. Of course, it will be more difficult, because points will be reduced for a small reserve. But if the other parts of the application are good, there are certainly chances. In grant policy, as in many other areas, the principle of "money for money" applies. That is, if the team is successful, it has a lot of groundwork and a lot of grants on this topic, it is easier for it to get the following. It is important for novice researchers to know whether they can get their first grant without publications in the track record. Let's just say it's more complicated. And sometimes it is directly prohibited by the terms of the contest. If they had an internship in a research team, whether it was a term paper or a diploma, which ended with a joint article with their bosses, they are considered to have more chances to do their project well. Therefore, experts like the presence of good publications even in the first grant application.

I've read everything, will I win a grant now? 

Like any competition, the fight for grants is in a sense a lottery. The share of grants won from the number of applications varies from 5 to 20% in the contests I know. This means that very good applications often do not pass the filter. Experts are also people, and they can subjectively relate to certain areas within their area of specialization. Hidden conflicts of interest are also not uncommon. It is important not to give up and submit the project to all available competitions, which the application you have created is suitable for, taking into account the comments of the examination. And if, God forbid, you find incompetence or bias in the review of the project, do not hesitate to inform the funds about it. It is impossible to appeal to review the results of the competition, but it is necessary to complain about the poor work of the expert. This can be noted in the relevant scientific councils and take measures: for example, exclude this expert from the list for future competitions.

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