SCIENCE IN THE NEWS DAILY
NIH Examines What Drove Its Grant Success Rate to a Record Low
from ScienceInsider
Last week, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) announced that the success rate for research grants, a closely watched indicator of how well investigators are doing in the struggle for funds, fell to an all-time low in 2011: 18%. At first glance, the drop appears to be due to increased competition, reflected in a steep rise on applications last year. But several other factors are also at play, including budget decisions made years ago, says NIH extramural research chief Sally Rockey.
The success rate is the number of funded grants divided by reviewed applications. The 18% success rate, announced by Rockey on her blog, is down 3% from 2010 and is slightly higher than a preliminary estimate last fall. It continues a decline from success rates of around 30% a decade ago when NIH's budget was growing. Part of the explanation is that the denominator is larger: Investigators sent a record 49,592 research grant proposals to NIH last year, an 8% rise.
But that's not the whole story, Rockey says in a blog post today. Much of the rise is explained by a 17% increase in proposals for a specific category of funding--short-term R21 grants. The mainstay for most labs is the larger R01, NIH's individual investigator-initiated grant, for which the success rate slid from 22% in 2010 to 18% in 2011. Applications rose 3% for R01s. Another reason for success rate slippage is that NIH funded fewer R01 grants compared with 2010. That's partly because the size of the average grant grew slightly and because NIH had less to spend overall on R01s (its budget was cut 1% last year).
Read more...
Science in the Media
Newspapers:
Magazines and Web Sites:
The Science-Media Intersection:
Subscribe to Our Content!
Visit our RSS Feeds page to choose among 13 customized feeds, or create a free My AmSci account to request an email notice whenever a specified author, department or discipline appears online.