I assume this is something related to the US and NIH Research Project Grant Program (R01), but I don't understand how one put value on a "single word"
Is there anyone who understands this sentence and care to elaborate what was implied by that?
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2 Answers
According to the yearly NIH report, in 2018, a total of 625 NIH Research Project grants (R01) were awarded, and the total cost for NIH (funding + other costs) of these grants was $347,466,328. This averages to $347,466,328/625, or about $556,000 of funding per year in one grant, or $2,780,000 in total for a 5-year grant
The Specific Aims application document is considered to be (one of) the most important part(s) of the application. The example document on that website has 601 words. The tweet in your question exaggerates the importance of the Specific Aims document, and implies that the document is "worth" the whole $2,780,000 of the grant. The cost of each word would then be $2,780,000/600, or approximately $4633 per word.
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3I guess the tweet just wants to highlight how stressful it is to write a document when you know that every word you write might be worth $4000 if you write them well enough.– wimiCommented Jan 11, 2020 at 9:17
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4Exactly, that is why you had better write a very good document. Otherwise, the next 5 years are gonna be hard. See what I mean? There is a lot at stake in a 600-word document.– wimiCommented Jan 11, 2020 at 9:22
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7@SSimon It's just a tweet, meant for people who have worked on these sorts of grants. If it doesn't speak to you, you don't have to like or retweet it.– Bryan Krause ♦Commented Jan 11, 2020 at 20:09
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2@SSimon Nobody's "shocked" or "astonished". It's just harrowing is all. You can probably just move on Commented Jan 11, 2020 at 21:18
R01s are the main grants given by the US NIH to research labs. They typically have a single PI but can have some other co-PIs, and depending on scope are worth a few hundred thousand USD per year over five years.
The "specific aims page" is a 1-page summary of the goals of the grant, kind of like an abstract. So, this tweet is connecting A) the words on 1 page of paper in a grant to B) the total value of that grant over 5 years. ($3000 to $4000) * maybe 500 words = $1.5 - $2.0 million over 5 years, $300-$400k per year.
There's nothing particularly insightful about it, although writing a specific aims page is a pretty time consuming part of writing one of these grants, since the space is so limited.
answered Jan 11, 2020 at 9:05
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interesting, why would she connected those two things? why is important– SSimonCommented Jan 11, 2020 at 9:14
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@SSimon I can only guess, but that's what I try to do in the last sentence of my answer. It's an important part of a grant application, so I suppose the difference between writing 500 good words and 500 bad ones is the value of the grant. Again, I don't think it's particularly insightful or anything, it's just making a statement about how the value of a grant compares to the actual document used to apply for one (though, just one piece of it; a full R01 grant application is many pages long).– Bryan Krause ♦Commented Jan 11, 2020 at 9:16
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I guess for comparison, my answer here took 135 words, the largest amount of money I expect to make out of it is $0, so that comes out to about $0 per word. Much less stressful to write this answer than to write a specific aims page where each word could be worth $4000.– Bryan Krause ♦Commented Jan 11, 2020 at 9:19
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Well you got upvote, which values for 10 points which values for personal satisfaction and those things are priceless. On the other hand having NO grant or funding is so much more stressful– SSimonCommented Jan 11, 2020 at 9:21
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When you look at the numbers this way, even expanding it to all 5000 words of the grant, it surprises me we don't pay at least for copy editors. Commented Jan 11, 2020 at 14:56