3 Steps to Take your R01 Resubmission from Scored to Funded
If your previous R01 received a score, but not quite in the fundable range, how can you make sure that it gets funded on your resubmission?
Through trial and error and much success (over 80% resubmission success rate!), my team and I have developed three major steps that you need to take on to ensure your R01 gets funded.
1 Review Your Summary Statement
The very first thing you want to do is take a deep dive into your summary statement. This is an opportunity to ensure you understand what reviewers are asking for and what they’re really saying in their critiques.
You’re going to come across a ton of obvious critiques, but what we notice more often than not is that there are also some not-so-obvious critiques. This is when you need to read between the lines of your summary statement to figure out what it is that the reviewers are asking you.
A hint: The obvious critiques are usually a reflection of the scientific merit of your proposal, and the less obvious critiques are geared toward your grantsmanship.
One of the best ways to accomplish this step is by conducting a line by line, critique-by-critique review of your summary statement. Then answer the question: Do you agree with the critique or not?
Whether yes or no, you will gather some useful information that will help guide your next step in the process of preparing your resubmission for funding.
2 Execute Your Plan
After assessing your summary statement and evaluating your needs, it’s time to execute your plan of action. When I’m working with PIs, we break this down into two separate parts.
The first part is addressing the critiques around the scientific merit of your R01. This directly correlates to your approach. Depending on what the reviewers say, this may involve generating more preliminary data to bolster your arguments around the different aims that you’ve created. This may also entail ensuring you build out your argument more clearly and establishing a clear path to understanding how you arrived at your central hypothesis. To further enhance the scientific merit, you may also need to refine your aims.
The next step in executing your plan is paying close attention to the critiques of your significance and innovation as it relates to scientific merit. Instead of solely looking at your approach, you may need to take a look at how you framed the significance and innovation of your proposal.
This means bolstering some of your arguments again so that reviewers can understand a few things:
How did you arrive at this research question in the first place?
What exactly makes it innovative?
How is it improving upon what is already known about the topic?
How is it moving the field forward?
This may take a little time to work on, but the benefit of strengthening your resubmission for reviewers makes it worth the time.
Elevate Your Grantsmanship
The third step in taking your NIH R01 from scored to funded is taking a closer look at the grantsmanship of your overall proposal. The main focus here is seeking out opportunities to better clarify and justify your decisions.
Think back to step one for a moment and reconnect with those areas where you agreed or disagreed with reviewer critiques. Your thoughts on these areas will give you some important information about why you are doing things the way you are and where you need to shift your attention to in order to establish more clarity in your resubmission.
Identify where those areas are and make sure you’re addressing them as best as you can with grantsmanship in mind.
A strategic next step is to look at how you framed your argument and evaluate if it resonated with your reviewers. For PIs whose R01 was scored but not funded, I always recommend this step because you’ve already done a good job here, and this is your opportunity to take it to the next level so your reviewers will fall in love with your resubmission.
Part of that process of taking from “like it” to “love it” is speaking directly to reviewers and asking yourself, “How can I make sure that I framed my application in a way that is relevant to the subject matter experts who are reviewing my application?”
One of the most important steps in elevating your grantsmanship is to put yourself in the shoes of your reviewer and make it as easy as possible for them to read and grasp the work you are proposing.
This comes down to not assuming their knowledge of the subject matter and instead connecting the dots of each area of your proposal. The idea here again is creating a proposal that is easy to read and understand and doesn’t require reviewers to think too hard and decipher what your R01 is proposing.
Generate Excitement
One more piece of the grantsmanship puzzle is to highlight aspects of your proposal that can generate excitement among your reviewers and create advocates for your proposal.
Remember, the difference between a grant that reviewers like and love, is the enthusiasm for your idea and its potential to advance your chosen field of interest.
Now, you want to be careful not to oversell the implications and impact of your research, but you do want to be abundantly clear and honest about your enthusiasm for the true potential of your research.
Some of the enthusiasm will come through in your style of writing, but most of it comes through consistently reminding yourself why you’re doing the research in the first place. Let that excitement and passion be the foundation of your writing.
If you write from a place of enthusiasm, it will translate into your R01 resubmission.
Conclusion
Your enthusiasm is contagious and plays a huge role in moving your grant from scored but not funded to a resubmission that is fully funded!
Do your deep dive into your summary statement, address each critique of your scientific merit, and elevate the grantsmanship so that your resubmission process will be a straight path to having your dream research project funded by NIH.
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If you have an R01 or R01 equivalent grant that is scored, but not quite in the fundable range, and you want to be absolutely sure that your grant gets a fundable score on resubmission, apply for a Strategic Grant Review. We have an 80% funding success rate on resubmission with our PIs who go through our program, so we know we can get you the results you’re looking for.