Writing grant proposals in epidemiology, preventive medicine, and biostatistics Lisa Chasan-Taber, CRC Press: Boca Raton FL. 2022. https://doi.org/10.1201/9781003155140

This review assignment was timely because I just re-submitted a proposal to the US government's National Institutes of Health (NIH) and writing it was … difficult.

Lisa Chasan-Taber is a professor of epidemiology who has had continuous grant funding for decades, been on many grant-review panels, mentored many junior colleagues in grant-writing, and taught a proposal-writing course for >20 years (the basis for this book). This book succeeds brilliantly: it is well organized, easy to read, and packed with practical advice. Its main target is early-career faculty but even senior researchers may find it educational—I did, and I have helped write about 250 proposals, though I have been the principal investigator (PI) of only four.

The book's first chapter covers Prof. Chasan-Taber's “Ten Top Tips for Successful Grant Proposal Writing.”. These illustrate the author's pragmatic focus and style, while bringing out non-obvious aspects of apparently obvious things. Here are the 10 tips quoted in bold-face capitals, which I discuss using my recent proposal as an example. I will use “grantsman” because female colleagues use it to refer to themselves.

START SMALL BUT HAVE A BIG VISION.

FOCUS ON SMALL GRANTS TARGETED TO EARLY-CAREER INVESTIGATORS.

“Each small grant … should be viewed as providing preliminary data for one or two of the specific aims of your ultimate larger grant. … [T]ry to envision your ultimate large project [, then s]tep by step, you start biting off small chunks of this larger grant through writing small grants designed to support one or two of these ultimate aims.” Like the book generally, this tip's discussion gives forward references to other tips and to later chapters, for example, the subsection “A Pitfall to Avoid: Interdependent Aims” states briefly why you should avoid them and refers to Chapter 6, “Specific Aims.”

When I first wrote a proposal as a PI, I was 25 years out of grad school and never considered starting with small grants. That was a mistake and would be an even bigger mistake for a young investigator. Prof. Chasan-Taber says, “In my experience as an NIH review panel member, [applying for an R01 as your first proposal] is almost certainly destined to fail” and she's right.

LOOK AT WHO AND WHAT THEY FUNDED BEFORE YOU. Prof. Chasan-Taber advises learning who is on the panel that will review your proposal, to get a sense of the reviewers. This is necessary but not foolproof. For the first submission of the grant I just re-submitted, our review panel differed from the roster the program officer sent us when we were writing the proposal; none of our three reviewers was on the roster we wrote for.

SPEND HALF YOUR TIME ON THE SPECIFIC AIMS AND PROJECT SUMMARY/ABSTRACT; send it to people to review, rewrite it, send it to more people to review, etc. Prof. Chasan-Taber also suggests studying aims pages of successful proposals responding to similar calls for proposals, to get a sense of the scope of successful projects, number of aims, and so on. This is, again, excellent advice. On the proposal I just re-submitted, a co-investigator who is a successful grantsman insisted that we spend what seemed an inordinate amount of time developing a conceptual diagram for the project. But he was right, because doing so served the same purpose as this tip: it clarified our thinking and summarized the project for reviewers, and we wrote the rest of the proposal around it.

SHOW THAT YOU CAN PULL IT OFF. This seems obvious but in our initial submission, we bungled it by assuming reviewers would read our bio-sketches and other secondary materials, and we did not say enough about our previous work or our relationship with our overseas collaborators. This is too important to leave to secondary materials.

YOUR METHODS SHOULD MATCH YOUR AIMS AND VICE VERSA. “Include methods that address each of your study aims while taking care not to include additional methods that do not correspond to any aims.” This again seems obvious but in some ways it is not. For example, our original submission said we have other datasets we would use opportunistically in developing our statistical methods and the reviewers dinged us for not giving a rationale for these specific datasets. When writing the revision, I suggested just re-wording this because I could not imagine how it could be bad to try our methods on other datasets. But our experienced grantsman agreed with Prof. Chasan-Taber and the resubmitted proposal does not mention other datasets; it even extols our main application as providing everything needed for our methods–development aims. As advice about how to do research, I think this is simply wrong but “what's sensible in doing methods research” ≠ “what you should put in the proposal.”

A PROPOSAL CAN NEVER HAVE TOO MANY FIGURES OR TABLES. “As compared to dense text, figures and tables make it easy for the reviewers to quickly grasp your proposal. … [T]he act of creating these figures and tables will help you to crystallize your specific aims and study methods … consider having a figure or table on almost every page of your proposal,” even the specific aims page. My gut reaction to this was: Yuk! I hate reading documents like that and some pictures are not worth the words they displace. But the point is not to please the grant writer, the point is to get the grant, and successful grantsmen do this.

SEEK EXTERNAL REVIEW PRIOR TO SUBMISSION. “It is … generally acknowledged that a local mock review panel can double your chances of funding.” This is good advice, the hard part is starting early enough to have time for external reviews.

BE KIND TO YOUR REVIEWERS. “The most effective way to make a reviewer happy is to help them complete their review forms. Do this by using the grant review criteria as subheadings in your application” and highlighting key sentences. I used to save space by hyphenating words at the ends of lines but a successful grantsman convinced me that the small saving in length was not worth the extra annoyance to reviewers from solid blocks of text with no white space.

IF AT ALL POSSIBLE, CHOOSE A TOPIC THAT YOU FIND INTERESTING! This sad comment on academia—is this how you envisioned a life in science, when you were a kid watching NOVA? —points to something I wish Prof. Chasan-Taber had addressed. This tip acknowledges indirectly that academics face an incentive to chase what is fundable rather than what they consider good and exciting science. Prof. Chasan-Taber could address this by explaining how successful grantsmen find proposal writing stimulating, or at least not soul-deadening: do they—does she—see grant-writing as an opportunity to dream up future projects? If it is possible to cultivate attitudes, this attitude, whatever it is, is worth cultivating. I, on the contrary, find proposal writing to be a dead loss apart from the small chance of getting the grant, and I am not alone. One able colleague recently left our university for a pharma company's consulting operation mainly because he wanted to spend his time doing statistics instead of spending his time hustling grants so he could pay grad students to do statistics.

The book's other chapters flesh out this summary with a systematic treatment of every step of writing a proposal. I will survey these briefly.

Part I, “Preparing to Write the Grant Proposal” has three chapters on things to do before you start writing and a chapter about scientific writing. For example, the chapter about time management recommends starting 4–6 months before the deadline and lists major tasks that should be done 4 months before the deadline, 3 months, etc. Section 3 asks “HOW BIG A RESEARCH GAP DO I NEED TO FILL?” and gives a helpful table of gaps that reviewers find convincing. Much of this part is about being strategic in your academic career, which could be helpful to people whose advisors (like mine) threw them in the deep end of the pool and let them figure out how to swim.

As for the chapter on scientific writing, if you have time to read only a short piece about writing, this is as good as it gets. (I fell in love with this chapter when the first page gave Orwell's six rules for writing.)

Part II, “The Grant Proposal: Section by Section” has 11 relentlessly practical chapters about writing the sections of an NIH proposal. As an example, Chapter 14, “Study Limitations to Consider,” discusses eight (!) general classes of limitations and the section “Issues for Critical Reading” has a table for each of cohort studies, randomized trials, and case–control/cross-sectional studies, listing possible limitations with specific questions you can address. No matter how long you have been writing proposals, this kind of checklist is valuable.

Part III, “Submission and Resubmission,” has chapters on boring but necessary parts of an NIH proposal, and on reviews and re-submitting a proposal. It has two other chapters for young researchers, on fellowships and early-career awards. The latter exemplify this book's attention to detail with, for example, advice for writing the “Contribution to Science” section of an NIH bio-sketch, which is hard for grad students who might reasonably think they have not yet made any contributions to science.

One possible weakness of this book is that it is totally focused on NIH proposals. For people outside the US or writing proposals to other agencies, the NIH-specific material will not be useful but the rest of the book is still immensely valuable. The book also emphasizes considerations pertinent to proposals in epidemiology, so people in other fields may find some chapters less useful, for example, Chapters 14 and 15 on study limitations.

As much as I admire this book, it lacked something that I will illustrate with a story. When I was 22, I decided I could make a living as a mandolin player. I spent the following summer with a fiddle player who was vastly more talented and enthusiastic than I was and I realized that for all that, he would still be hard-pressed to support himself and probably would not be able to afford health insurance until he was old enough for Medicare. I knew I did not have a prayer and decided instead to do work for which I had some talent. For grant-writing, as for music or athletics or math, there is such a thing as talent and for some people, trying to make a living by writing grants is simply futile. My recent proposal convinced me, finally, that I am one of those people. Prof. Chasan-Taber would do her readers a favor if she told them that grant-writing requires talent, that everyone must decide at some point whether they have enough to justify cultivating it, and then giving frank but kind advice about how to make that decision.