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Editorial
. 2024 Mar 1;118(3):590-594.
doi: 10.1016/j.ijrobp.2023.09.030.

Empirically Derived Principles for Research Funding Success: A Primer for Early Career Academic Investigators

Kareem A Wahid  1 , Michael K Rooney  2 , Jillian R Gunther  2 , Amy C Moreno  2 , Chelsea C Pinnix  2 , Charles R Thomas Jr  3 , Clifton D Fuller  2
Affiliations
Editorial

Empirically Derived Principles for Research Funding Success: A Primer for Early Career Academic Investigators

Kareem A Wahid et al. Int J Radiat Oncol Biol Phys. .
No abstract available

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Figures

Figure 1.
Figure 1.
An overview of the three principles underlying this editorial and how their interactions lead to successful early-career academic investigators. Individuals should seek to liberally apply for funding (Principle 3), thereby not only gaining potential early wins (Principle 1) but also gaining crucial experience from inevitable failures (Principle 2), ultimately maximizing their long-term success.
Figure 2.
Figure 2.
Effect of an early-career grant on winning a mid-career grant (left) and applying for a mid-career grant (right). Shown is the percentage of early-career grant applicants winning a mid-career grant (left, vertical axis) and applying for a mid-career grant (right, vertical axis) for different evaluation ranks of applicants in the early-career grant competition (horizontal axis). Applicants with positive ranks (+) to the right of the funding threshold (vertical line) received an early-career grant, while applicants with negative ranks (−) did not. For each estimate, an exact 95% confidence interval is displayed. Reprinted with permission from Bol et al. (6).
Figure 3.
Figure 3.
Near-misses (orange) outperformed narrow-wins (blue) in scientific impact. Here, the authors considered three measures probing the clinical relevance of their research: 1. clinical trial papers [direct contribution to clinical translation]; 2. papers cited by at least one clinical trial paper [indirect contribution to clinical translation]; 3. papers with potential to become translational research. (a) Near misses outperformed narrow wins in terms of the probability of producing clinical trial papers in the next 1–5 years, and 6–10 years; (b) The same as (a) but for papers cited by clinical trials in the future; (c) The same as (a) but for papers with potential to become translational research; ***p < 0.001; Error bars represent the standard error of the mean. Modified from Wang et al. (8); this is an open-access article distributed under a CC BY license.
Figure 4.
Figure 4.
Visual depiction of the three measures of agreement (intraclass correlation [ICC], Krippendorff’s alpha [α], Similarity Score) among grant reviewers with 95% confidence intervals. Note that only the upper bound of the confidence interval is shown for the ICCs because the lower bound is, by definition, 0. Reprinted with permission from Pier et al. (12).
See this image and copyright information in PMC

References

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