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…

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…

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…

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…

Today’s blog is intended to help authors avoid common mistakes that can diminish the impact, or prompt outright rejection, of a research manuscript…

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…

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…

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…

In a study published in 2013, John Bohannon provided alarming information about open-access scientific journals. The author submitted a manuscript representing a fabricated study, from a fabricated author, from a non-existent research institute to 304 open-access journals. The manuscript contained…

Many biomedical journals offer authors an opportunity to identify potential reviewers for their manuscript. Published evidence has consistently supported the conclusion that author-recommended reviewers respond more favorably to submitted manuscripts than editor-selected reviewers. In a recent…

In a recent article from the May 25, 2017 issue of Nature entitled “The best-kept secrets to winning grants”, author Kendall Powell interviewed a number of experts, including our own Dr. John Robertson, who revealed their top tips and tricks…

Because our contact list has grown substantially since we began posting blogs more than a year ago, we thought this would be a good time to offer a summary of our popular blog series, “Dangerous Words to Avoid in Grant Applications.” This blog series and our other blog posts are…

In a series of blogs over the past year we have discussed a number of errors that many novice (and sometimes experienced) proposal writers make in the preparation of their grant proposals. Each of these blogs have been predicated upon the argument that it is critically important that…

Approximately two months ago, we posted a commentary in which we listed thirty reasons why applications for grant support were likely to fail. That post attracted significant interest among our readers as well as several comments. One of the more frequent questions concerned the issue as to whether the list of thirty reasons was presented in order of relative importance…

As we have discussed in earlier blog posts, there are certainly many things that a grant applicant must consider in writing his or her proposal. Probably one of the most important things that we suspect that most applicants have never thought about is…

Over the past year, we have posted a number of short blogs in which we have discussed issues that careful proposal writers should try to avoid in order to be entirely accurate in communicating information. In other words, we are committed to the concept that applicants should…

Why was my outstanding grant application so intensely disliked by the reviewer panel? Although this is certainly a reasonable question for any failed applicant to ask, at least initially, in the vast majority (but unfortunately, not 100%) of cases, the answer is usually not too difficult to surmise. In our experience…

Over the past several months, we have posted a number of blogs related to relatively common errors and misuses of words in the English language that have the potential to alter the meaning of an applicant’s intended usage, usually not to the applicant’s benefit. In this respect, we are firm believers in…

In the past several months, we have discussed a number of relatively common words and phrases used by grant applicants that are, at best, inappropriate, and at worst, potentially misleading and wrong…

One of the fundamental points that is relevant to almost all grant proposals is the fact that the proposal is (or at least should be), designed to address a problem or need (that the target funding agency also recognizes as important). Thus, the primary (but certainly not only) purpose of the proposal should then be to explain to the funding agency (and/or the reviewers) what the applicant’s idea(s) would be as to how to address that need or fix the problem. To achieve these goals…

Over the past several months, as a regular component of our weekly blog, we have been discussing the inappropriate usage of various English language words in grant applications. In many cases, such inappropriate usage can present concerns among reviewers as to what exactly is meant by the applicant…

During the past several months, we have posted a series of blogs concerning what types of words and phrases to avoid in the preparation of grant applications. In this month’s blog on this topic, we consider the commonly used phrase…

Probably among the most commonly used words in grant proposals is the verb/noun “(to) understand”. Applicants very frequently plan grant applications that have been designed to “understand” something, whether an explanation for a certain social phenomenon, a biochemical pathway, clarification of an as yet to be identified series of observations, or even a way to explain the underlying reasons for a given historical event. Thus, how common it is to read: “The objective in this proposal is to understand the underlying reasons for…”. Alternatively, there are those applicants who feel it important to be…

Two words that should usually be avoided by applicants in preparing their grant applications are “IF” and “WHETHER”. These words represent distinct manifestations of the same concept, since “If” implies “It might or it might not”, and “Whether” always provides for the option “Whether or not”. The primary problem with their use is that they both provide opportunities for a negative outcome to occur. While it is certainly possible that either a positive or an alternative…