The meaning of a grant rejection

Let’s start by considering what a grant rejection usually means. I would argue that in the vast majority of cases a grant rejection signals that the significance and potential impact of your overall idea wasn’t convincing enough for reviewers.

Talented researchers get grants rejected all the time, making it very unlikely that there’s something fundamentally flawed with all of their research ideas. Instead, it means that something’s gone wrong with how you’ve presented your arguments or how you’ve crafted the narrative of your research grant.

Reading between the lines of reviewer comments

It’s hard not to obsessively focus on reviewer comments when preparing a grant resubmission. After all, they’re designed to offer you a justification for your evaluation score and to give you useful feedback for future versions of your grant.

However, you need to keep in mind that reviewers are required to fill out a series of specific questions on their evaluation forms. Which means that their comments will overwhelmingly focus on specific details about your grant, rather than identifying larger problems with the framing or communication of your ideas.

Although it’s possible to identify larger issues with your grant through a careful reading of your feedback, it’s important to know that this will involve reading between the lines.

Reading between the lines: an example

Let’s consider the following examples of feedback comments for an unsuccessful grant proposal:

1. The focus on technologies of health accountability could be further developed in the state-of-the-art.
   

2. The use of existing networks in policy circles (to achieve the expert interviews) could limit opportunities for new insights in the project. There is insufficient consideration of this.
   

3. The proposal sits within the established paradigm of sociology of health, and this could restrict novelty by providing insufficient opportunity by the researcher to question core assumptions.

One way to approach this feedback is to go through each of the points and address them individually. This might create the following action points:

1. The focus on technologies of health accountability could be further developed in the state-of-the-art. Action: Justify the empirical focus on technologies of health accountability in the state-of-the-art.
   

2. The use of existing networks in policy circles (to achieve the expert interviews) could limit opportunities for new insights in the project. There is insufficient consideration of this. Action: acknowledge that using existing policy circles might risk limiting opportunities for new insights but argue how you will ensure it doesn’t.
   

3. The proposal sits within an established paradigm of the sociology of health, and this could restrict novelty by providing insufficient opportunity by the researcher to question core assumptions. Action: cite emerging critique of traditional sociological approaches from critical sociologists of quantification.

What’s nice about this approach is that it gives you a manageable list of corrections, which can immediately make you feel more in control of the resubmission process.

But let’s consider a different approach.

A different approach would be to take a step back to consider what these comments are implying about the proposal as a whole. When we do this, it becomes clear that the reviewers’ strongest message is that they’re sceptical about the proposal’s novelty.

 This is most obvious in point #3. Point #2 implies that the method of interviewee sampling limits the project’s capacity for novel insights; however, if the proposal had provided a strong and compelling case for why it is original and impactful in its opening paragraphs and state-of-the-art, it’s unlikely that the sampling method is a major issue at stake here.

By taking this second approach, you set yourself up with a very different task, albeit a more challenging one. Instead of focusing on addressing each and every reviewer criticism or recommendation, it involves asking yourself a set of tough questions that focus on the fundamentals of your proposal. These questions include:

• If you feel like your reviewers have misunderstood what you were proposing, how can you communicate your ideas in a clearer manner?
• If your reviewers are implying that your proposal isn’t original or impactful enough, how can you re-frame or improve your arguments to make its value more obvious?
• What knowledge and arguments might be distracting from the proposal’s main message, and how would removing these impact the proposal’s overall narrative?

Why you should take the hard road

Taking the second approach means taking the hard road, but I argue it’s the one that gives you the best possible chance of submitting a grant proposal that finally gets a winning score.

It’s doubtful that your grant is going to get reviewed by the same people, so it’s very likely that the minor criticisms of your original submission won’t be picked up on by the new set of reviewers.

The factor that will remain consistent across all reviewers – past and future – is that they will be looking to reward a grant that clearly communicates its value and impact.

Everyone knows there are no guarantees when it comes to research grant success. But by asking yourself the difficult questions about your proposal you will be giving yourself the best chance to finally craft your ideas into a winning grant.