Why Stating Hypotheses in Grant Applications Is Unnecessary.

This Viewpoint argues that a hypothesis-centric approach to writing grant applications is problematic and instead suggests that funding applications should be evaluated by their relevance and methodological quality rather than by qualitative assertions before the study is conducted.

Alphabetical ordering of author surnames in academic publishing: A detriment to teamwork.

INTRODUCTION: In academia, many institutions use journal article publication productivity for making decisions on tenure and promotion, funding grants, and rewarding stellar scholars. Although non-alphabetical sequencing of article coauthoring by the spelling of surnames signals the extent to which a scholar has contributed to a project, many disciplines in academia follow the norm of alphabetical ordering of coauthors in journal publications. By assessing business academic publications, this study investigates the hypothesis that author alphabetical ordering disincentivizes teamwork and reduces the overall quality of scholarship. METHODS: To address our objectives, we accessed data from 21,353 articles published over a 20-year period across the four main business subdisciplines. The articles selected are all those published by the four highest-ranked journals (in each year) and four lower-ranked journals (in each year) for accounting, business technology, marketing, and organizational behavior. Poisson regression and binary logistic regression were utilized for hypothesis testing. RESULTS: This study finds that, although team size among business scholars is increasing over time, alphabetical ordering as a convention in journal article publishing disincentivizes author teamwork. This disincentive results in fewer authors per publication than for publications using contribution-based ordering of authors. Importantly, article authoring teamwork is related to article quality. Specifically, articles written by a single author typically are of lesser quality than articles published by coauthors, but the number of coauthors exhibits decreasing returns to scale-coauthoring teams of one to three are positively related to high-quality articles, but larger teams are not. Alphabetical ordering itself, however, is positively associated with quality even though it inhibits teamwork, but journal article coauthoring has a greater impact on article quality than does alphabetical ordering. CONCLUSIONS: These findings have important implications for academia. Scholars respond to incentives, yet alphabetical ordering of journal article authors conflicts with what is beneficial for the progress of academic disciplines. Based on these findings, we recommend that, to drive the highest-quality research, teamwork should be incentivized-all fields should adopt a contribution-based journal article author-ordering convention and avoid author ordering based upon the spelling of surnames. Although this study was undertaken using articles from business journals, its findings should generalize across all academia.

Assessing health research grant applications: A retrospective comparative review of a one-stage versus a two-stage application assessment process.

BACKGROUND: Research funders use a wide variety of application assessment processes yet there is little evidence on their relative advantages and disadvantages. A broad distinction can be made between processes with a single stage assessment of full proposals and those that first invite an outline, with full proposals invited at a second stage only for those which are shortlisted. This paper examines the effects of changing from a one-stage to a two-stage process within the UK's National Institute for Health Research's (NIHR) Research for Patient Benefit (RfPB) Programme which made this change in 2015. METHODS: A retrospective comparative design was used to compare eight one-stage funding competitions (912 applications) with eight two-stage funding competitions (1090 applications). Comparisons were made between the number of applications submitted, number of peer and lay reviews required, the duration of the funding round, average external peer review scores, and the total costs involved. RESULTS: There was a mean number of 114 applications per funding round for the one-stage process and 136 for the two-stage process. The one-stage process took a mean of 274 days and the two-stage process 348 days to complete, although those who were not funded (i.e. the majority) were informed at a mean of 195 days (mean 79 days earlier) under the two-stage process. The mean peer review score for full applications using the one-stage process was 6.46 and for the two-stage process 6.82 (5.6% difference using a 1-10 scale (with 10 being the highest), but there was no significant difference between the lay reviewer scores. The one-stage process required a mean of 423 peer reviews and 102 lay reviewers and the two-stage process required a mean of 208 peer reviews and 50 lay reviews (mean difference of 215 peer reviews and 52 lay reviews) per funding round. Overall cost per funding round changed from £148,908 for the one-stage process to £105,342 for the two-stage process saving approximately £43,566 per round. CONCLUSION: We conclude that a two-stage application process increases the number of applications submitted to a funding round, is less burdensome and more efficient for all those involved with the process, is cost effective and has a small increase in peer reviewer scores. For the addition of fewer than 11 weeks to the process substantial efficiencies are gained which benefit funders, applicants and science. Funding agencies should consider adopting a two-stage application assessment process.

From Research Training to Scientific Advancement-Contributions from the Implementation Research Institute: An Introduction to the Special Issue.

The special series is designed to provide examples of funded implementation research conducted by alumni of the first four cohorts of the Implementation Research Institute (IRI). The introduction links the six substantive papers to the conceptual and methodological challenges laid out in a 2009 publication in this journal which led to the IRI training program in the emerging science of implementation with a special focus on behavior health settings. The 7th paper in the series illustrates an innovative evaluative approach to design and measurement of IRI fellow publications and grants informed by the training program such as bibliometrics. The introduction also notes some elements identified in the 2009 foundational paper not represented in these papers such as costs as well as important developments and foci in the decade since 2009 such as de-implementation, sustainability, dynamic adaptation processes, and hybrid designs that need to be an integral part of training programs in implementation research.

Voices: The Future of Metabolism.

While reflecting upon the past five years of metabolic research, we asked leaders in the field what they envisioned the next five will hold and what challenges must be overcome. Here is an inspiring look onward to 2025, from leveraging technology and collaborations to advancing therapeutics and augmenting healthspan.

Multidisciplinary Team Reviews of Drug Overdose Deaths and the Use of Minigrants to Advance Recommendations: A Statewide Pilot in Rhode Island.

CONTEXT: Rhode Island has been significantly impacted by the opioid epidemic, ranking 11th in unintentional drug overdose rates in the United States in 2017. Illicit fentanyl was involved in the majority of these deaths. PROGRAM: To enhance surveillance of this epidemic, the RI Department of Health piloted in-depth, multidisciplinary, and multiagency team reviews of drug overdose deaths. The goals were to identify gaps in policies and programming and develop recommendations to prevent future deaths. Time-sensitive minigrants were offered to nonprofit organizations as a novel way to further the recommendations put forth from these reviews. IMPLEMENTATION: Legal agreements between select state agencies and institutions enabled broad team representation and the sharing of information during each meeting. Reviews, revolving around a common theme, were conducted for up to 10 deaths each quarter. Recommendations for prevention were generated by the team and summarized in a report to the Governor's Overdose Prevention and Intervention Task Force and the public within 1 month of each meeting. Announcements of minigrant opportunities and funding to advance the community-specific recommendations were paired with each meeting. EVALUATION: From November 2016 through May 2018, the pilot team convened 7 times, generated 78 recommendations, and distributed 31 minigrants. Early process evaluations of these grants have shown positive impact within local environments. Following the pilot phase, state legislation for these reviews was passed in June 2018. DISCUSSION: The RI Department of Health was able to successfully pilot a multidisciplinary review process for overdose deaths and has recently institutionalized this process through legislation. The successful implementation of many of the team's community-oriented recommendations, supported through a minigrant process, highlights the impact that small financial investments can have to address the opioid epidemic and may be a model for other jurisdictions seeking to advance recommendations from these types of reviews.

Financing Global Common Goods for Health: When the World is a Country.

"Global functions" of health cooperation refer to those activities that go beyond the boundaries of individual nations to address transnational issues. This paper begins by presenting a taxonomy of global functions and laying out the key value propositions of investing in such functions. Next, it examines the current funding flows to global functions and the estimated price tag, which is large. Given that existing financing mechanisms have not closed the gap, it then proposes a suite of options for directing additional funding to global functions and discusses the governance of this additional funding. These options are organized into resource mobilization mechanisms, pooling approaches, and strategic purchasing of global functions. Given its legitimacy, convening power, and role in setting global norms and standards, the World Health Organization (WHO) is uniquely placed among global health organizations to provide the overarching governance of global functions. Therefore, the paper includes an assessment of WHO's financial situation. Finally, the paper concludes with reflections on the future of aid for health and its role in supporting global functions. The concluding section also summarizes a set of key priorities in financing global functions for health.

Assessment of potential bias in research grant peer review in Canada.

BACKGROUND: Peer review is used to determine what research is funded and published, yet little is known about its effectiveness, and it is suspected that there may be biases. We investigated the variability of peer review and factors influencing ratings of grant applications. METHODS: We evaluated all grant applications submitted to the Canadian Institutes of Health Research between 2012 and 2014. The contribution of application, principal applicant and reviewer characteristics to overall application score was assessed after adjusting for the applicant's scientific productivity. RESULTS: Among 11 624 applications, 66.2% of principal applicants were male and 64.1% were in a basic science domain. We found a significant nonlinear association between scientific productivity and final application score that differed by applicant gender and scientific domain, with higher scores associated with past funding success and h-index and lower scores associated with female applicants and those in the applied sciences. Significantly lower application scores were also associated with applicants who were older, evaluated by female reviewers only (v. male reviewers only, -0.05 points, 95% confidence interval [CI] -0.08 to -0.02) or reviewers in scientific domains different from the applicant's (-0.07 points, 95% CI -0.11 to -0.03). Significantly higher application scores were also associated with reviewer agreement in application score (0.23 points, 95% CI 0.20 to 0.26), the existence of reviewer conflicts (0.09 points, 95% CI 0.07 to 0.11), larger budget requests (0.01 points per $100 000, 95% CI 0.007 to 0.02), and resubmissions (0.15 points, 95% CI 0.14 to 0.17). In addition, reviewers with high expertise were more likely than those with less expertise to provide higher scores to applicants with higher past success rates (0.18 points, 95% CI 0.08 to 0.28). INTERPRETATION: There is evidence of bias in peer review of operating grants that is of sufficient magnitude to change application scores from fundable to nonfundable. This should be addressed by training and policy changes in research funding.