Grant applications will waste your time

A response to "Rejected Grants Are Good for You" by New Science

Niko McCarty at New Science recently published a post about how “Rejected grants are good for you”. The core claim, that writing grant applications isn’t as big of a waste of time as it seems, is based on a preprint by Kyle Myers which analyzed data from a previous paper about how scientists’ work changed during the COVID-19 pandemic¹.

Having recently applied for an NIH grant, I would like to give my own perspective on this. In my experience, some of the output of grant application writing can be transferred to other scientific activities, but I’m not as optimistic about how much this matters.

Taking my recent F31 application as an example, I spent 67 hours working on the initial submission (which was rejected) and 32.5 hours working on the re-submission, for a total of 99.5 hours.

I was able to re-use several figures and paragraphs of text from my F31 application in my recent preprint, and I estimate this saved me about 20 hours of effort. I also will be able to re-use some of the bureaucratic paperwork (with minor to moderate changes) if I apply for more NIH grants in the future. Overall I estimate that out of 99.5 hours spent on the F31 application, I was able to save about 25 hours of effort on subsequent things.

This is not too far off from Myers’ statement that “at least one third of the effort spent on applications is scientifically useful”. I think if this hadn’t been my first NIH grant application and I didn’t have to do all the forms from scratch, the 1/3 number would probably be true for me as well.

But in my opinion there’s still a great deal of room for improvement here. It’s definitely not the case that if I didn’t apply for the grant, I wouldn’t have written up my results, made figures, and planned experiments. Furthermore, it wasn’t just me who spent time on my F31 application: the department has a full-time employee to manage grant paperwork, and she probably spent about 8 to 12 hours on my various materials.

As a final note, regarding time tradeoffs:

In a 2018 survey, scientists said that “at least one third of the effort spent on applications is scientifically useful,” Myers says. And "for each additional hour scientists report spending on fundraising, they report spending 6 minutes less engaged directly on their research,” Myers says.

In other words, more fundraising does not mean less research.

In contrast, “when scientists report spending an additional hour on teaching or administrative duties, they report spending 24 minutes less on their research."

In my experience, this is largely because teaching and administrative duties take place during normal workday hours and directly conflict with research, whereas grant writing can be done late at night, and trades off against things like sleeping, or spending time with family (or blog writing, for me).

There’s definitely a world of difference between the NIH and more agile organizations like New Science or the FTX Futures Fund. Grant applications may be a necessary evil, but their burden should be minimized.

One possible improvement would be to put out an initial call for applications based only on the scientific ideas (since working on those would be more transferrable to other projects), and then ask for bureaucratic information from those applicants whose ideas seem promising. The NIH already does this to some extent with their “Just in Time” forms, but I think this doesn’t go far enough. If you’re going to reject an application, it’s best to do so before wasting too much of the applicant’s time.

1. Unfortunately the data are not publicly available due to the IRB wanting to preserve participants’ privacy.