Responding to critical feedback is unavoidable in science.
Depending on your view and experiences, peer review might be a necessary evil.
But when it comes to grant applications, peer review is essential, meaning that responding to criticism of your grant proposals is inevitable.
This article gives you some simple strategies to ensure you respond to criticism in a constructive and proportionate way. It also explains why peer review is essential for funding agencies and gives you some tips to ace grant resubmission.
Why Does Peer Review Exist?
As career scientists, we want the world to believe in us enough to support our science so we can keep doing it.
We ask for this support by writing and submitting grant proposals for evaluation by funding agencies.
If we have done our homework and clearly articulated why they should give us money, we have done our job well and will likely be rewarded with the funds to keep our science going.
Asking for this support means that we are subjecting ourselves to the system of peer review.
Why Funding Agencies Rely on Peer Review
In 2007, The Royal Society defined peer review as:
“The only effective way of properly assessing the quality of research proposals.“
Most, but not all, funding agencies employ peer review to gather feedback from scientific experts to objectively and rigorously evaluate the strength of proposed research plans.
This ensures that the best proposals are funded and that the return on the investment of taxpayer or donor money is realized.
The peer review system is imperfect.
Objectivity and rigor can sometimes be eclipsed by things such as:
- Bias.
- Ignorance.
- Competing interests.
Peer review can also favor those who can demonstrate results over those with potentially groundbreaking ideas.
For all of its flaws, the system of peer review is the best system we have for guaranteeing that high-quality grant proposals get funded.
How to Respond to Criticism of Grant Proposals
Now you understand why funding bodies rely on peer review, here’s my advice on responding to criticism of your grant proposals.
Follow Simple Instructions
I have reviewed hundreds of grant proposals for federal and non-federal agencies.
In each case, these agencies received many more proposals than they could possibly review.
To minimize the burden, reviewers are frequently told to eliminate half of their assigned proposals from the review process.
This seems quite unfair, but it is a really good filter to get to the better proposals.
My experience has shown that at least half of the proposals submitted are written by people who can’t (or won’t) follow directions.
This usually manifests as:
- Inappropriate font size.
- Inappropriate page margins.
- Poor formatting.
- Inattention to word length restrictions.
- incompleteness.
More features of rejected proposals are unclear hypotheses, no supporting data, unclear aims, lack of innovation, or text that was clearly copied and pasted from another unrelated proposal.
My thought was always that if the author cannot follow simple instructions, why should we entrust them with precious taxpayer or donor resources?
Always read the instructions for grant preparation offered up by the funding agency and do everything they ask.
Remove Your Emotions
I had a very successful academic career, but only about 5% of my submitted grants ever got funded.
A low success rate for sure.
However, that’s the reality of funding for science. It was euphoric when any grant was funded.
It was always extremely painful when they were rejected, and having to read critical reviews of my work made it even more painful.
Sadness, frustration, and anger were the dominant emotions.
Take a break and step away from the feedback.
This will put you in a better frame of mind to respond to it.
It took me years to stop taking rejection so personally and thinking it was a reflection of my ability or intelligence.
I found that walking away from it for a few days always helped. Talking with my colleagues also helped. After my head cleared, I was able to focus on how to repair the damage.
Divide the Feedback into Two Columns: Criticism and Response
Some funding agencies do not provide reviews at all.
This makes life easier for the funder, but it is not helpful to the scientists applying for their funds.
For the funding agencies that do provide reviews, there are typically three reviewers, and they are tasked with providing anonymous written comments and a numerical score on each section of the proposal.
These scores are tabulated, and the comments are collected into a written review and returned to the scientist.
Upon receiving the review, you will likely be allowed to resubmit the proposal with a response to the reviewers’ comments.
It’s helpful to create two columns in a document after receiving your reviews:
- Column A should list all negative comments (combine duplicate comments).
- Column B should list how you intend to respond to those comments.
This method is extremely helpful for quantifying the nature and extent of various comments and ordering your thoughts.
The comments (and any scores you assign to them) can be very revealing about the reviewers.
Learn What Comments Say About the Reviewers
First, when negative comments from a reviewer are extremely brief, it is indicative of someone who didn’t read the proposal closely and likely focused on a very small number of things to criticize.
Your response to this reviewer can be to reference areas of your proposal they might have missed and that may help you to easily overcome their criticisms.
Second, when the negative comments are from a reviewer who wrote extensively on the offending parts of your proposal, it indicates this person cares deeply about you as a scientist, even if it doesn’t come across that way.
Their comments are meant to make you a better scientist. They may even have revealed enough information that you can take an educated guess who that reviewer might be.
Try to Identify Who Reviewers Are
The US NIH publishes the names of the reviewers on each study section. Other funding agencies might do the same. Spend some time to check if the one you are applying for funds from lists its reviewers.
If they do, use this information to create a more educated guess as to their identity.
If you can, try to reference their work in the response to the reviewers, but do not mention anyone’s name as if you were addressing them directly.
Carefully Consider All Criticisms from the Reviewers
These reviewers are told to provide constructive criticism to help guide the applicant—only a small percentage of reviewers have an axe to grind.
Most of the time, they are upset because you didn’t reference their work in the grant proposal. These people can be dealt with in a variety of ways, such as:
- Paying deference to them in the response to reviewers can disarm them.
- Arguing logic with them since you are the true expert. Sometimes, they will relent, and sometimes they won’t.
- Or you can just ignore them and hope they go away. It may take several more tries to get your grant proposal pushed through, but it will likely be a better proposal.
The Resubmission
Realize that you may not be seeing the forest for the trees when it comes to your original proposal and reviews.
Take the time to truly understand the reasons why your grant proposal has been rejected.
Talk to experienced and successful grant writers about your experience and get their assessment of your situation.
This is especially important for resubmitting to the same funding agency or submitting a revision of the original proposal to a different funding agency.
Your proposal may have fatal flaws, some of which were discussed above.
Another fatal flaw could be a lack of significance.
That is, are you proposing to study a problem that is unimportant or that has little translational value?
If so, find a significant problem to research where your solution may benefit large numbers of people.
Your proposal could lack innovation which underscores the importance of doing your background research before submitting your ideas. A frequent fatal flaw is that investigators tend to be overambitious in what they propose.
Always consult with experienced scientists to determine if you can accomplish the work with the time and money you have available.
Finally, a lack of experience in a given field can kill a proposal.
The solution to this is to collaborate with experienced people in the field of interest or scale back your proposal to small grants that will fund high-risk, high-reward proposals or proposals where the investigator is taking a new scientific direction.
If you keep submitting and getting rejected, you might be applying to the wrong funding agency.
Responding to Criticism of Grant Proposals Summarized
Writing successful proposals is a journey requiring solid preparation and the advice of experts. Persistence will win out every time.
Discouragement is a natural response to rejection, so pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and get back in the game. Hopefully, the advice in this article on how to respond to criticism of your grant proposals helps you do that.
Check out the webinar I did with Bitesize Bio for further advice on responding to criticism of your grants and hear what questions other scientists asked me on this issue.
Astound Research’s Role
Astound Research has collected and curated thousands of federal and foundation funding opportunities in life sciences and engineering disciplines. Provide the platform with your CV or biosketch, and we go to work on your behalf. We use AI to extract the scientific keywords representing your expertise and match them to relevant funding opportunities—in seconds. Your task is to decide which opportunities are right for you.
Astound also provides personalized Scouting Reports for subscribed researchers, listing active funding opportunities to save search time, identify high-probability sources, and create a strategic funding roadmap. These plans are based on direct discussions with researchers to align their skills and aspirations with optimal funding targets, considering career stage, past successes, and future research. Quarterly updates ensure reports reflect new opportunities. With decades of experience and extensive review of thousands of funding options, our goal is to help researchers build a robust portfolio for high-quality grants.
Visit www.astoundresearch.com to learn more.
