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Resubmission

If you are one of the careful and fortunate researchers to have your grant funded on the first submission, congratulations! However, if your grant was not funded on your first submission attempt, do not despair—it is extremely common to have to resubmit an application. For this reason, the NIH allows up to two resubmissions for a single grant application.

How to Handle Rejection

• Read the summary statement, let it age in a dark place for a week, and then re-read it.



• Discuss unclear items with the SRA.



• Call your PO to discuss possible resubmission.

(adapted from a presentation by Dr. Elliot Postow, CSR, NIH)

The questions below may be a useful starting point for deciding to resubmit your grant application.

Should I resubmit? What did the reviewers say?

• Poor writing;



• Wrong research design;



• Need additional information or details;



• No preliminary data;



• Significance and background sections insufficient.

Comments like these indicate that you may have had a good idea, but some aspects of your proposal need work. If you are still interested in the research you proposed, why not resubmit your application? Approximately 40 percent of new research grant awardees received their awards for a resubmitted grant proposal.

If you revise and resubmit your proposal, make sure you:

• Address all reviewer comments on the summary sheet, even if you do not agree with them.



• Write a detailed introduction summarizing the important changes in your proposal (no longer than three pages). This introduction should serve as a guide to the reviewers for locating revised sections of your proposal. This is the most important section of a resubmitted grant!



• Mark all new or altered sections in the proposal text (with italics or bold type).



• Revise the budget and collect updated support letters.



• Submit your revised proposal within 2 years of the date of the first application.

Remember that the reviewers of your revised application, although possibly reading your proposal for the first time, will have a copy of the summary sheet from your original grant proposal. This means they will know what you were asked to change, and they will know if you did not change anything.

Does my proposal have fatal flaws? What did the reviewers say?

• Work deemed not important;



• Hypotheses unsound;



• Work already done;



• Work not innovative;



• Methods proposed not suitable for testing hypotheses.

These comments indicate some serious flaws in the rationale and design of your project, and you may want to rethink the feasibility and salience of the project you proposed.

Try another angle on the research issue or collecting a different type of data.