Tag: writing

“What Grant Reviewers Actually Look For (and What They Ignore)”

A close colleague of mine at a major US research university begins the process of preparing a grant proposal by creating something he calls a “storyboard”.  When I was growing up in LA, the concept of a storyboard was very familiar to me.  Many of my high school friends, at the time, aspired to careers in the locally dominant entertainment industry. The storyboard, invented by Walt Disney, used pictures to visualize a movie’s plot flow before production—often even before a screenplay was complete. In the LA movie business, you could look at a storyboard and pretty much get right away what a movie is about.

Back to the colleague of mine who uses storyboard to create grant proposals—his key idea is that you’re done making the storyboard, when someone outside the group can come in, look at it, and come away with a good understanding of what the grant is all about. If the storyboard is coherent, then it’s easy to make the proposal coherent as well. Further, the storyboard often gets reused in a modified fashion as the grant’s central graphic. Yes, a picture is worth several thousand words.

My colleague is onto something profound about how grant review works, across all funders, including those in the private sector.  But for this issue of Science Policy Insider, we’re going to consider the agency where I headed up Biological Sciences, the NSF. What about NIH, you may ask? A lot of the principles here go for both agencies. But here, we’re going to focus, laser-like, on the National Science Foundation, even as it undergoes drastic changes.

The Brutal Reality of NSF Panel Review

After sitting through too many grant panels at NSF, I can tell you this: most proposals get 15-20 minutes of discussion time in a panel that’s reviewing 30-50 proposals over three days. Your carefully crafted 15-page research plan? The primary reviewer read it thoroughly. The other two panelists skimmed it. Everyone else glanced at the summary.

This isn’t because reviewers are lazy. They’re exhausted, brilliant researchers who read proposals outside their immediate expertise, often late at night, while also worrying about their own grants, their trainees, and the paper referee statements they owe.

The storyboard approach works because it acknowledges this reality: reviewers are looking for a straightforward narrative they can grasp quickly and defend to the panel.

What Actually Happens in Review Panels

Here’s how it typically unfolds:

9:00 AM, Day Two of panel: The primary reviewer presents your proposal. They have 5 minutes to summarize your aims, approach, and why it matters. If they struggle to articulate your story coherently, you’re in trouble—not because your proposed science is bad, but because they can’t effectively advocate for you.

The secondary and tertiary reviewers add their perspectives. Then the panel discusses. The program officers watch for enthusiasm, coherence of the argument, and whether anyone is deeply opposed.

The proposals that succeed have champions—reviewers who “get it” immediately and can explain why it matters to others. The storyboard method facilitates championing reviewability.

What Reviewers Actually Look For

After watching this process play out thousands of times, here’s what I learned reviewers truly care about:

1. Can I explain this to the panel in 3 minutes?

If your research plan requires a flowchart to understand, the primary reviewer will simplify it—possibly incorrectly. Better to give them the simplified version yourself.

2. Is the question worth answering?

Not “is this interesting?” but “will anyone care about the answer?” Reviewers need to justify spending taxpayer money. Give them that justification explicitly.

3. Can this person actually do this?

No matter what is written down in the solicitation, preliminary data matters enormously, but not for the reason applicants think. It’s not about proving the hypothesis—it’s about proving you have the technical capability and haven’t missed an obvious problem.

4. Is this the right approach?

Reviewers are surprisingly forgiving about whether your specific hypothesis is correct. They’re much less forgiving about whether you’re using appropriate methods or have thought through alternatives.

5. Will this move the field forward?

Notice: not “revolutionize” or “transform”—just move forward. Incremental progress from a well-designed study beats a transformative idea with unclear methods. But doesn’t the call state that the proposed work should change the world? Sure, but from a practical standpoint, what counts for the reviewers is steady progress. And here’s the tricky part: while steady is key for the reviewers, transformative really is important for the program officers who make the penultimate decision. So, a balance is necessary.

What Reviewers Ignore (Even Though You Spent Weeks on It)

The extensive literature review: They skim it to see if you know the field. The 47 citations demonstrating your comprehensive knowledge? They checked that you cited the key papers and moved on.

Your detailed budget justification: Unless something looks wildly off, reviewers assume you know what your research costs. The line-by-line explanation of why you need that particular microscope? Skimmed.

Your publication list: They look at: Do you publish in good journals? Are you productive? Have you published on this topic before? That’s it. The distinction between your 47th and 52nd paper doesn’t matter.

The broader impacts section that you agonized over: I feel guilty about this because, I’ve often harped about broader impacts as a central criterion. Truth: most reviewers read this quickly to verify you addressed it competently. Unless it’s either exceptional or terrible, it rarely drives funding decisions. And these days, broader impacts means how the work will benefit all American citizens (think public health) or US National security.

The Elements That Actually Drive Decisions

Clarity of the research goals: Can the reviewer recite your three main questions without looking at the proposal? If not, rewrite.

Logical flow: Does each aim build on the previous one? Or are they three unrelated projects stapled together? Reviewers can tell.

Feasibility signals: Preliminary data, established collaborations, access to necessary resources, realistic timeline. These say, “this person will actually complete this work.”

Positioning: Is this filling a real gap, or are you slightly tweaking someone else’s approach? Reviewers want to fund work that moves us somewhere new, even if incrementally.

The writing quality: Clear, direct prose suggests clear thinking. Dense, jargon-heavy writing suggests unclear thinking (even if that’s unfair).

The Most Common Mistake

Applicants try to impress reviewers with complexity and comprehensiveness. They want to show they’ve thought of everything, considered every alternative, read every paper.

But reviewers are looking for clarity and confidence. They want to understand quickly what you’re proposing and why it matters. They want to feel confident you’ll succeed.

The storyboard method works because it forces simplicity. If you can’t draw a simple picture of your proposal that an outsider immediately understands, you don’t have a fundable story yet.

But Wait, There’s More

As hinted at above, at NSF, that panel review…. it’s strictly advisory. I’ve personally seen proposals with excellent reviews get declined and the reverse. The key decisional person? That’s the cognizant program officer for the solicitation. These days, there’s an additional vetting to look for alignment with the Administration’s political goals, but that’s a topic for a future newsletter.

What This Means for Your Proposal

Before you write a single word:

  • Can you explain your project in three sentences?
  • Can someone outside your subfield understand why it matters?
  • Do you have a clear narrative arc from question to approach to impact?

If not, you’re not ready to write. You’re ready to storyboard.

Build the simple, clear story first. Then elaborate carefully, making sure every detail serves that core narrative.

Reviewers are smart, busy people trying to identify good science under time pressure. Don’t make them work to understand your brilliance. Give them a story they can grasp, defend, and champion.

That’s what my colleague understood. And based on his funding success rate, the reviewers appreciate it.

How to write a review paper…

The first task is to choose a topic that is both interesting and not recently reviewed. This requires some judicious use of Google Scholar. I think it’s also useful to have some demonstrable expertise in the area, although for most senior scientists, they are broad enough in their interests and knowledge to get by with a pretty shallow knowledge base. This first task is arguably the most important since it will drive everything else.

Once the topic is chosen, the next step is to conduct a first cursory review of the most important literature. In other words, you actually have to actively read some papers. This first review of the literature is not meant to be exhaustive. That comes later. Rather, its purpose is to prepare the ground for the next step: the review paper equivalent of a news ‘hook’. This is the notion of an insight that comes from a synthesis of the extant relevant literature. So if we were reviewing explainable AI, the hook might be that biological brains might provide both existence proof and likely explanation. If we were reviewing macrosystems approaches to ecology, the hook might be that robust standardization of measurements at continental-scale is required. The key is that the hook should be non-obvious, but emerges from a rigorous synthesis of the literature.

At this stage, the bibliography construction should begin using appropriate software. I use Zotero, but there are many good choices. The key function we are looking for is the ability to seamlessly grab a citation (and the full pdf) from Google Scholar and store it for later insertion into the manuscript document. This is the most important research stage of writing the review paper and it feeds back onto the prior ‘hook’ step since a full reading of the literature may change the results of the synthesis. That’s fine and is perfectly normal for the proper evolution of an excellent review. When this step is complete manuscript writing can commence.

I tend to write from an outline. This is one method for proceeding. It’s not the only one. If one does use the outline approach, the key is to outline the review so that the hook is never standing alone and obvious as the author’s opinion, but rather naturally emerges from the evidence presented in the paper in the mind of the reader. This is tricky. The reason for this subtlety is that review papers are not hypothesis or position papers.Their proper function is to lay out the evidence in such a way that synthesis emerges organically from the evidence. So the hook has to stay in your ‘mind’s eye’ and hidden from the printed page.

My parents, who were scientists themselves, taught me to use the scientifically formal passive voice for writing. This style was echoed during my training. Both my thesis advisor and post-doc mentor employed such a style. Today, we use a more active voice in our writing–not quite as informal as a blog entry, but certainly using more direct and simple language. Whatever the style, the key is to have citations accompany each claim. In review papers, we usually summarize a set of results in a sentence that contains the relevant paper’s first author as the subject and then the summary of what their scientific RESULTS revealed. So an example would be: “Olds et al (2020) found that soil exposed to fixed nitrogen had reduced bacterial diversity compared to controls.”

For a review paper, I complete the figures after I complete the text (I do the opposite for a regular research publication). Figures for a review paper can be adapted from other figures in the literature with written permission and explicit acknowledgement in the figure legend. The key is to adapt the figure so that it is not identical to the original. I choose figures to assist the reader in their synthesis laid out in the review. Once again, the idea is not to overtly lay out your hook, but rather to schematize the results from the literature in such a way that the reader gleans the hidden gem.

Finally, the bibliography can be built automatically by your software and inserted at the end of the document in the proper format. Congrats, you are ready to submit!