Elements of successful NIH grant applications.

Is there a formula for a competitive NIH grant application? The Serenity Prayer may provide one: "Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the ability to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference." But how to tell the difference? In this Perspective, we provide an inclusive roadmap-elements of NIH funding. Collectively, we have over 30 y of peer review experience as NIH Scientific Review Officers in addition to over 30 y of program experience as NIH Program Officers. This article distills our NIH experience. We use Euclid's 13-book landmark, The Elements, as our template to humbly share what we learned. We have three specific aims: inform, guide, and motivate prospective applicants. We also address ways that support diversity and inclusion among applicants and young investigators in biomedical research. The elements we describe come from a wide range of sources. Some themes will be general. Some will be specific. All will be candid. The ultimate goal is a competitive application, serenity, and hopefully both.

Non-White scientists appear on fewer editorial boards, spend more time under review, and receive fewer citations.

Disparities continue to pose major challenges in various aspects of science. One such aspect is editorial board composition, which has been shown to exhibit racial and geographical disparities. However, the literature on this subject lacks longitudinal studies quantifying the degree to which the racial composition of editors reflects that of scientists. Other aspects that may exhibit racial disparities include the time spent between the submission and acceptance of a manuscript and the number of citations a paper receives relative to textually similar papers, but these have not been studied to date. To fill this gap, we compile a dataset of 1,000,000 papers published between 2001 and 2020 by six publishers, while identifying the handling editor of each paper. Using this dataset, we show that most countries in Asia, Africa, and South America (where the majority of the population is ethnically non-White) have fewer editors than would be expected based on their share of authorship. Focusing on US-based scientists reveals Black as the most underrepresented race. In terms of acceptance delay, we find, again, that papers from Asia, Africa, and South America spend more time compared to other papers published in the same journal and the same year. Regression analysis of US-based papers reveals that Black authors suffer from the greatest delay. Finally, by analyzing citation rates of US-based papers, we find that Black and Hispanic scientists receive significantly fewer citations compared to White ones doing similar research. Taken together, these findings highlight significant challenges facing non-White scientists.

Cryptic late-onset myocarditis after coronavirus vaccination.

As we enter a new era of mRNA-based therapeutics, evidence on genetic or environmental factors that might predispose to unknown off-target side effects, gains in importance. Among these factors, exercise appears likely to have influenced otherwise cryptic cases of early-onset postvaccination myocarditis. And the existence of a distinct late-onset myocarditis is now being recognized. Here, three case-history reports suggest crypticity (the author's own case), unless provoked by a preexisting cardiac morbidity (one case), or by immune checkpoint blockade to enhance anticancer autoimmunity (several cases). These reports are supported by noninvasive fluorodeoxyglucose-based cardiac scan comparisons of multiple vaccinated and unvaccinated subjects. In pre-pandemic decades, applications for funds by the leading innovator in mRNA-based therapeutics seldom gained peer-review approval. Thus, at the start of the pandemic, the meager data on such side effects could justify only emergency approval. We must do better.

Is novel research worth doing? Evidence from peer review at 49 journals.

There are long-standing concerns that peer review, which is foundational to scientific institutions like journals and funding agencies, favors conservative ideas over novel ones. We investigate the association between novelty and the acceptance of manuscripts submitted to a large sample of scientific journals. The data cover 20,538 manuscripts submitted between 2013 and 2018 to the journals Cell and Cell Reports and 6,785 manuscripts submitted in 2018 to 47 journals published by the Institute of Physics Publishing. Following previous work that found that a balance of novel and conventional ideas predicts citation impact, we measure the novelty and conventionality of manuscripts by the atypicality of combinations of journals in their reference lists, taking the 90th percentile most atypical combination as "novelty" and the 50th percentile as "conventionality." We find that higher novelty is consistently associated with higher acceptance; submissions in the top novelty quintile are 6.5 percentage points more likely than bottom quintile ones to get accepted. Higher conventionality is also associated with acceptance (+16.3% top-bottom quintile difference). Disagreement among peer reviewers was not systematically related to submission novelty or conventionality, and editors select strongly for novelty even conditional on reviewers' recommendations (+7.0% top-bottom quintile difference). Manuscripts exhibiting higher novelty were more highly cited. Overall, the findings suggest that journal peer review favors novel research that is well situated in the existing literature, incentivizing exploration in science and challenging the view that peer review is inherently antinovelty.

Nobel and novice: Author prominence affects peer review.

Peer review is a well-established cornerstone of the scientific process, yet it is not immune to biases like status bias, which we explore in this paper. Merton described this bias as prominent researchers getting disproportionately great credit for their contribution, while relatively unknown researchers get disproportionately little credit [R. K. Merton, Science 159, 56-63 (1968)]. We measured the extent of this bias in the peer-review process through a preregistered field experiment. We invited more than 3,300 researchers to review a finance research paper jointly written by a prominent author (a Nobel laureate) and by a relatively unknown author (an early career research associate), varying whether reviewers saw the prominent author's name, an anonymized version of the paper, or the less-well-known author's name. We found strong evidence for the status bias: More of the invited researchers accepted to review the paper when the prominent name was shown, and while only 23% recommended "reject" when the prominent researcher was the only author shown, 48% did so when the paper was anonymized, and 65% did when the little-known author was the only author shown. Our findings complement and extend earlier results on double-anonymized vs. single-anonymized review [R. Blank, Am. Econ. Rev. 81, 1041-1067 (1991); M. A. Ucci, F. D'Antonio, V. Berghella, Am. J. Obstet. Gynecol. MFM 4, 100645 (2022)].