Ten fatal mistakes in grant writing.

Abstract

I have just stepped down as the Chair of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) Initial Review Group for Epidemiology, Prevention, and Services Research. The massive title means only that I chaired the meetings of the group of scientists who reviewed the grant proposals that many psychologists and other scientists submitted: grants to study epidemiological, social, psychological, or treatment aspects of drug abuse. Our primary task was to decide whether the research had scientific merit. If, in our judgment, the proposed study was good science, we then assigned a priority score to the grant: a score showing how much we thought the research would contribute to scientific knowledge about drug abuse. Those ratings were extremely important; they almost always determined whether a proposal could eventually be funded. While I was on the committee, not one single grant that the committee rejected was funded. Furthermore, more than 90% of the time, the proposals that were funded were selected from those that had the best priority numbers. I do not want to discuss how to prepare a good grant proposal or even list all of the little things that can go wrong. There are excellent materials available elsewhere on how to write a grant (Gordon, 1978; Holtz, 1979; Lindholm, Marin, & Lopez, 1982). After participating in this review process for several years, however, I decided that there were a few very basic mistakes that people made, mistakes that almost always led to rejection of their proposals. I saw these same fatal flaws time and again at NIDA, and also when serving as a special reviewer for other agencies. Avoiding these errors might keep one from wasting a lot of time and effort in preparing a proposal that would have almost no chance of being funded.