THREE QUESTIONS TO ADDRESS RIGOUR IN YOUR PROPOSAL

Addressing weaknesses and limitations in your science will reassure potential funders. Since 2018, the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) has required that research proposals explicitly describe scientific rigour. Through our grant coaching, we have found that addressing scientific rigour often...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Nature (London) 2021-08, Vol.596 (7873), p.609-610
Main Authors: Wilson, Jennifer L, Botham, Crystal M
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Bias
Drug dosages
Grants
Methods
Proposals
Reproducibility
Science
Wound healing
Writers
Writing
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:Addressing weaknesses and limitations in your science will reassure potential funders. Since 2018, the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) has required that research proposals explicitly describe scientific rigour. Through our grant coaching, we have found that addressing scientific rigour often requires careful and specific wording: instead of, "We will use our new method to anticipate drug effects," we would guide a writer to "We will calibrate our new method using a landmark dataset, a gold-standard comparison in our field, to benchmark against known effects before anticipating new drug effects." In another scenario, the sentence, "We will assess treatment effects by comparing wound healing of the untreated left leg and treated right leg," needs an introductory clause: "We have previously shown that wound-healing rates are different between individual animals, making it difficult to compare between them [references]. [...]we will generate two wounds on the same animal and apply treatment to only one wounded area."
ISSN:0028-0836
1476-4687
DOI:10.1038/d41586-021-02286-z