Common Mistakes in NIH Applications

Lynne Hutchison
VUMC Grants Writer & Awards Administrator
lynne.hutchison@vanderbilt.edu

 

The five review criteria for NIH grant applications are: Significance, approach, innovation, investigator, and environment.

 

Common Mistakes:

 

Problems with significance:

• Not significant, exciting, or new
• 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