Integrating Literature & Funding Searches

Investigators need to show funding agencies that their work is important, necessary, innovative, and well-founded. These attributes are largely determined by the eyes of the beholder, the funding agency. So, to be able to create an argument for sponsors, an investigator must be confident in their project and how it fits in the larger field of work and must understand how to communicate that to the sponsor. This is done by conducting a comprehensive literature search, as well as conducting a comprehensive funding search, and you'll save time and realize the most robust results if you can integrate both of these searches.

Literature Searches
Last year, ORDE offered a seminar in partnership with the Auraria Library to help investigators integrate these two important themes. Lorrie Evans, Research and Instruction Librarian offered the following tips to investigators when conducting a literature search.

• Ask/Meet with a Librarian: Librarians can help you to identify silos outside of your area of focus, and perhaps in other disciplines that are relevant to your work.
• Familiarize yourself with the capability of key databases: To have confidence that you're finding everything you need, learn the limitations and functions of the databases you're using (your librarian can give you insight into "what's under the hood" of your database)
• Search scholarly literature by the number of citations: You can find seminal pieces in your field and other fields by finding those that are highly cited.
• Capture/Save your work: The Auraria library website allows you to save your literature searches when you enter your credentials. This can save you time from having to remember what you searched and where from session to session.
• Use a reference management tool: These tools allow you to capture the literature that is relevant to your work, tag these articles, and directly import your references to a Bibliography. There are many tools available, including EndNote, Mendeley, Sente, and Zotero.

Fund Searches
At the same time that you're using these tips to find and scan the relevant literature, you want to be framing your work to make it a contender for funding. Here are some tips from ORDE to do this.

• For faculty members, meet with ORDE and let us conduct a fund search for you. We work with you to understand your research and then provide you with a search document that outlines relevant sponsors, deadlines, program announcements, and more to familiarize you with the funding landscape.
• Know what projects are being funded in your area.
• Once you identify sponsors that may be a good fit for your research, dig deeper to understand the history, ideology, and preferred approach for research to ensure that your project is a good fit and/or to help you align it with the sponsor's interests and goals.

Integrating Searches
If you are intentional about integrating your literature and fund searches from the get-go, you'll likely find that it saves you time, but also gives you a more dynamic outlook on your research that will allow you to make the best decisions for you and your project(s).

To integrate, we suggest that you use your Aha! moments to remind yourself to dig into the other side of your search. When you discover something in the literature, take that same element and work to understand if that discovery has been funded or is being funded and which sponsors are or may be interested in the work. On the flip side, when you discover a related project that is currently being funded, can you delve into the scholarly literature to anticipate what other projects will be necessary or what other gaps in the literature there are surrounding that project that would be good candidates for funding.

In moving back and forth across the literature and funding landscapes, you can feel confident that you are developing research that has the best chance at success.

Resources
ORDE Website
Auraria Library Website
Video Clip on Literature Searches - Lorrie Evans

PCORI - New Funding Cycle Aug. 6th

The Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI) is about to open its new funding cycle on August 6th. PCORI is a viable sponsor for healthcare research that focuses on and meaningfully engages patients.

PCORI's priority areas along with estimated budget percentages:

• Assessment of Prevention, Diagnosis and Treatment Options (42%)
• Improving Healthcare Systems (21%)
• Communication/Dissemination Research (10.5%)
• Addressing Disparities (10.5%)
• Improving Methods for Conducting Patient Centered Outcomes Research (16%)

The PCORI blog has offered a sneak preview of some of the changes for this cycle, which include,

• Letters of Intent (LOIs) will now go through a competition to determine responsiveness and fit and those selected will be invited to submit a full proposal
• The engagement template is now integrated into the proposal
• The Research Strategy page limit is increasing from 15 to 20 pages
• The biosketch is revised to allow for more patient/stakeholder information
• There are less fields on the PCORI online application

ORDE held a Know Your Agency Lunch last year with PCORI-funded researcher and Associate Professor, Amanda Dempsey, who offered the following tips when applying to PCORI:

• Read the directions REALLY, REALLY carefully
• Read the priority areas REALLY, REALLY carefully
• Repeat the language from the RFA/PA in the grant
• Try to find a PCORI grant reviewer to give feedback on study ideas
• Try to find some patients to give you letters and quotes
• Put everything in a patient-centered frame

Be sure to watch the Upcoming Opportunities page on the PCORI website for the PCORI Funding Announcements (PFA's), five of which will be released on August 6th (with required letters of intent due September 5th)..

Resources:
How applicant feedback will inform our new funding cycle - PCORI Blog
Know your Agency Brief: PCORI - ORDE

Mentorship Teams

Great mentors are crucial to development in any career path, but this is no more true than for faculty researchers. Mentors can advise you and support you in focusing your research, attaining funding, balancing your commitments, prioritizing, etc. Given this initial list, it's not surprising that mentoring is a large time commitment, especially for the mentor.

Excellent mentors are difficult to find, and those with excellent reputations can be even more difficult to secure as a mentor. You want to be very careful about having a mentor in name only, especially if you're using that mentor's name to apply for a mentored funding award. Dr. Jean Kutner, Professor in the School of Medicine, at an ORDE seminar last year cautioned participants against this practice. Your research community is usually small enough that reviewers know if a mentor is overcommitted and being used in name only, and will question the feasibility of your career development plan because of it.

Dr. Kutner offered a creative solution to this - research teams. As a senior researcher and mentor, she has more requests for mentorship than she can realistically commit to. However, she has mentored several investigators to a point where they are now able to effectively mentor others. So what she has done is to recommend some of her more developed protégés as mentors to new early career investigators (ECI's). She gave one example of an ECI who was applying for a K award from the NIH who had Dr. Kutner listed as her senior mentor and one of Dr. Kutner's protégés as her main mentor. Dr. Kutner had committed to meeting monthly with the ECI, and the protégé met with her weekly.

This approach offers benefits to all the team members. The ECI is able to have a junior mentor who is accessible to them and able to work with them closely and a senior mentor to lend extra credibility and more of an oversight role to the mentorship group. The junior mentor gains substantive experience and expertise as a mentor. They are being "mentored into mentoring" by the senior mentor, suggests Kutner. The senior mentor benefits from being able to more effectively manage their time and lend their expertise in a way that doesn't lend itself to fatigue.

Traditionally a mentor was thought of more as one guru who had answers and advice for every query their protégé might have, but today, given the ever more diverse responsibilities of faculty researchers, having a diverse mentoring network to support you makes more sense. So, as you identify and ask well-known mentors to work with you, when they apologetically explain that they are time-constrained, ask them if they can recommend one of their protégés  or propose a mentorship team where they take more of a senior mentorship role. In this way you can get the support that you need and effectively use the time and expertise of multiple mentors.

Resources
A Mentoring Plan for Junior Faculty - University of Utah, Vice President of Research (good definitions of possible types of mentoring)
Mentoring Best Practices Handbook - University at Albany (SUNY)

How many grants should I be writing?

At a recent ORDE talk on the grant development process, a researcher asked whether it made more sense for Early Career Investigators to go through the grant development process illustrated below, following the ORDE 6-month timeline, or to just send out as many proposals possible to see what sticks.

It certainly is tempting to try to up your chances of funding by sending your project to every agency that might be interested. But, there are two consequences in this approach that are not always obvious. The first consequence is the opportunity cost. Although it takes longer to develop a comprehensive and responsive grant, it still takes a significant amount of time to "throw a grant together." You still have to understand the formatting requirements and respond to the program announcement. Agencies oftentimes have very different requirements when it comes to biosketches, project descriptions, budgets, and supplemental documents. So reformatting the same information again and again takes a lot of time, for little (if any) return.

The other danger of simply repackaging a project for different agencies without tailoring it to their needs, goals, and interests is that you risk building a reputation for yourself that is sloppy. If PO's see an application thrown together and submitted by someone they've never been in contact with, they know that the PI did not put a lot of thought into the grant. Also, given the relatively small worlds of research, your reviewers are often your colleagues and having them review poorly crafted grants can cast you in a bad light.

The truth is that there is no easy money in the sponsored research world. Shaking the tree as hard as you can will just wear you out - both from the amount of work you'll put in, and the frustration of hearing "no" again and again if  your grant is even reviewed.

Your best strategy is to really build your skill and credibility with the few sponsors who are a good fit for you and your research. This is done by understanding the sponsor, working with the PO, customizing your work for the sponsor, and revising and resubmitting to the same sponsor when there is a good fit. This approach does not eliminate the hard work that goes into successful grant writing, nor does it eliminate the frustration felt when you get a "no." What it does offer you is a fighting chance at getting your grant reviewed, building a positive reputation for yourself amongst your colleagues, and it significantly improves your chances for a "yes."

Resources
Proposal Development Timeline
Proposal Development Resources

Researcher Independence - What is it / How do I show it?

Given the approaching July 4th holiday, I thought I would dig into the often-elusive topic of researcher independence. Many sponsors look for PI's to prove their independence before they are awarded major grants, and many early career grant programs look specifically at an investigator's potential to become independent. So, what do you need to do to show independence?

Have your own space
Sponsors must be confident that you as the PI have the time, space, and resources at your discretion to successfully complete your project and to continue your work after the project. Most sponsors do not want to fund research that seems to be "one and done," they want to see longevity in your research and they want to know that you will continue your work after your award expires.

Show a clear differentiation between your research and your mentor's research
Mentors are crucial to supporting their proteges to become independent, but the best mentors foster their proteges to not only develop the skills they need to be productive in the mentor's lab, but also the skills to manage their own lab, write their own grants, develop their own ideas, etc. Sponsors are not interested in helping to cultivate a clone of your mentor; they'd rather just support the original. But, when you can demonstrate your unique niche in the field and begin to build a track record of your own, then sponsors will be interested.

First author major publications
Even if you're doing large amounts of research and writing for the pubs that you are co-authoring, it is essential that you also first author some of those publications. This indicates that you are the leader of the research being conducted and solidifies for sponsors that you are not just contributing to someone else's work, but are instead creating original research.

Receive grants and execute projects as PI
Although it is a limiting definition, the capstone of researcher independence is to receive significant funding from a major sponsor. This is the R01 from the NIH or a large prestigious award from the NSF or Department of Education. The catch 22 in these situations is that these awards prove you are an independent investigator, but you have to prove you are an independent investigator to get them. This is often a hump that early career investigators encounter. But, again, with the right mentor, and with the earlier categories secured, you're often prepared to tackle this barrier. Remember, that many major agencies are looking to fund newer investigators to grow the research pipeline.

These categories are really benchmarks on your way to showing researcher independence. To achieve them you want to have a concrete plan that leads you toward that independence. It's also essential to have support and a great mentor to help illuminate and facilitate your path. Happy Independence Day!

Resources
Making the Leap to Independence - Science Magazine
Resources for Early Career Investigators - Howard Hughes Medical Institute