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Successful grant fishing in funding droughts

Nature Cell Biology volume 9, pages 856–857 (2007)Cite this article

To the Editor:

For several decades, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) played a crucial role in providing the resources to support biomedical research within the United States and further afield1. Although the NIH budget doubled from 1999 to 2003, it has steadily decreased since then in real-dollar terms, prompting widespread concern in the scientific community2. In the past, the NIH budget has routinely suffered from times of decreased funding, and also profited from periods of increased funding. Principal investigators, in turn, respond to these cycles by adjusting their efforts to obtain support for their work. Securing NIH grants entails considerable effort to write an application with the hope of getting it funded. Thus, the 'success rate', that is the proportion of the number of grant proposals that are funded among those submitted, is an extremely important factor3.

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Figure 1: Relation between success rate, that is the fraction of submissions that received funding, and the total amount of biomedical inflation-corrected support awarded by NIH each year in 1970–2006 (left axis, blue circles), or the ratio between this value and the corresponding number of submissions (right axis, red asterisks).

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Acknowledgements

G.A.A. is currently supported by NIH grants NS39600, AG025633 and MH050006, and contract DA-HHSN271200577531C.

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  1. and Psychology Department, Giorgio A. Ascoli is at the Center for Neural Informatics, Structure and Plasticity, Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study, Neuroscience Program, George Mason University, 4400 University Drive, Fairfax, VA 22030-4444, USA. ascoli@gmu.edu,

    Giorgio A. Ascoli

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Ascoli, G. Successful grant fishing in funding droughts. Nat Cell Biol 9, 856–857 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1038/ncb0807-856

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