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Getting Oriented

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Fundamentals
Get help writing and editing your application.
Write for your peer reviewers, your application's audience.
Find experts to help with technical matters and fill in gaps.
Your application's audience is the group of peer reviewers who review your application and give it an overall impact/priority score, the most important determinant of its success.

In NIH Grant Cycle: Application to Renewal, we walk you through the NIH application section by section.

We tell you how to write to your audience, create a hypothesis-driven application, address NIH review criteria, and organize your application to make it easy for reviewers to find information.

As a new or early-stage investigator, you should consider seeking advice and filling in gaps with mentors, collaborators, or consultants. If you do not have a well-known mentor or a string of publications, you can compensate by getting a well-established investigator to sign on as a collaborator.

  • A mentor or other adviser can help you plan a study design that enables you to analyze your data, test your hypothesis, and achieve your goals.
  • Collaborators can fill gaps in your expertise and resources and will impress reviewers if known in the field.
  • Experts can execute any of the technical and analytical aspects of the project.
  • They can also help develop detailed information for the application on such items as sample size estimates, sampling and research design, data definitions, and analytic models.
  • It helps to choose a mentor or collaborator who is well known and respected; reviewers may recognize his or her name.
  • Try to get your application assigned to a study section where some members know the work of your mentor or collaborator. A proposal assigned to a study section whose members have barely heard of an investigator may have a weaker chance of success.

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