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You’ve written, rewritten, revised, spellchecked, paginated, copied
and sent your application off into the wide wide world of NIH. Whew!
What happens next?
The NIH Center for Scientific Review (CSR) receives your application,
logs it in and gives it a unique ID number. CSR assigns your application to one of its Integrated
Review Groups for
initial peer review of most grant types or to a specific institute if the
application is in response to a request for application (RFA). At this time,
the CSR will send the PI a confirmation of receipt (also known as an assignment
notification letter) via email or regular mail. Note: Your assignment notification
letter will include the study section your application is assigned to and
the name of the administrator to contact for further information. Save
this letter for future reference! It will probably be a few months
before your study section meets and you’ll want to know who to contact
if you have any questions. CSR mails applications to reviews to read and asks them to streamline the
list of applications. The review group (study section) conducts an initial review for scientific
merit and votes a priority score.
A word on priority scores: Reviewers in a study section give each application
a priority score. These scores are averaged to create a three-digit number,
which is the final score for that application. A 100 is the highest possible
score, and a 500 is the lowest possible score. These scores are placed in percentiles.
From Getting Funded,
Percentiling is a reflection of the rank of a particular score in the pool
of all scores given by a study section in its current meeting plus the two
previous meetings. For example, an application whose score ranked number 50
out of 100 applications would receive a percentile of 49.5, according to the
following formula:
P = 100 x (R-½) / N
In the formula, P is the percentile, R is the ranking (in this case, 50) and
N is the total number of applications.
The percentiling process is specific to each study section and is the way
that NIH Institutes can account for different scoring behavior in the various
study sections. Thus, if the 20th percentile is a 150 priority score in Study
Section A and a 190 priority score in Study Section B, both applications are
considered in the 20th percentile and are treated as such when funding decisions
are made by the Institutes.
Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Burroughs Welcome Fund, 2004
- The Scientific Review Administrator
(SRA) prepares a summary statement of review results and sends these to the PI and to the NIH Institute that
is considering funding the application. Summary statements are generally
received six to eight weeks after the initial review. Note: If the application
is in funding range, PI receives a letter notifying of the need to get IRB and/or IACUC approval if not already obtained.
On average, only about half of the applications receive a score from a study
section. Applications that are judged by a study section to be in the lower
half of the applications evaluated in a given review round are streamlined.
These applications are generally not reviewed during the study section meeting,
but returned to the applicant with the assigned reviewers' written comments.
After the initial review, your application moves to the NIH Institute where
it will be housed if funded. A national advisory
council conducts a secondary
review for program relevance and funding and makes recommendation to the
Institute. If your application is fundable, staff at the Institute’s Grants
Management Branch negotiates an award with you. You will receive a notice
of grant award within six weeks of the advisory council’s approval. - If your application did not get funded, you can revise it based on the
feedback from the review and resubmit it for another review.
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