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Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) Funding

Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) Funding. Ideas/Suggestions From My Experiences as a Competitor and Reviewer. Overview of Suggestions . 1. Build an interdisciplinary team & speak to a broad interdisciplinary audience

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Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) Funding

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  1. Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) Funding Ideas/Suggestions From My Experiences as a Competitor and Reviewer

  2. Overview of Suggestions 1. Build an interdisciplinary team & speak to a broad interdisciplinary audience 2. Couch your study/program in a rich historical-theoretical context 3. Take a balanced, rather than fundamentalist, approach to methods 4. Emphasize practical (clinical or policy), rather than mere statistical significance 5. Persist (be responsive to comments)

  3. CIHR Context 1. Interdisciplinary in philosophy, mandate, mission and practices 2. Highly competitive (20% success norm) 3. Very demanding committee workload 4. Health and health care research are necessarily applied 5. Scholarly quality 5-10 fold more valued than mere quantity (e.g., track record)

  4. How CIHR Contextual Factors Play Out in the Review Process Ideas/Suggestions on How to Use Them to Your Advantage

  5. Challenge 1: Diverse Committees With Large Workloads - Diverse disciplinary, philosophical, & methodological perspectives - Not unusual for A & B internal or external reviewers to be discordant - Not unusual: - 100+ proposals to review - Each member A or B reviewer on 20 to 25 proposals - 60 to 80 hours of prep before Ottawa

  6. Solution 1: Attract An Advocate (Best If Not in Your ‘Choir’) - 3rd person in debate is often critical - Interesting ideas up front (jargon-free) - Connect to practical significance - Underscore preventive potential - Provide theoretical context (political, clinical or biological plausibility) - Balanced presentation of detailed methods (don’t pick a fight here)

  7. Challenge 2: Very Competitive - Regrettably, it seems that many quit It is probably true that: - CIHR has a unique culture - Committees are sometimes philosophically, methodologically, even politically unbalanced - Extreme views are represented - Fundamentalist perspectives typically don’t win (in or out of committee)

  8. Solution 2: Focus on What You Can Control or Change - Stay in the game and in so doing learn to play the game better, and ultimately, win - Be responsive to reviewer comments - Build an empowering team - Interdisciplinary researchers - Competent methodological expertise - Practitioners, decision makers - Senior experienced scholars - Junior scholars (faculty & graduate students): value added training

  9. Challenge 3: Assessment of Track Record Quality - Many committee members try to level the disciplinary playing field by ‘standardizing’ this assessment - Research published in the most competitive scholarly forums - Prestigious, high impact, peer- reviewed journal articles emphasized - Uptake maters: SSCI/SCI citations - Other, less competitive, nonpeer- reviewed works pretty much ignored: chapters, abstracts, even books, etc.

  10. Solution 3: Plan Ahead to Play the Game Most Powerfully - In this game, quality trumps quantity - A junior scholar could thus plan a strategy to win a New Investigator award (1st 5 years post-Ph.D.) - One can always be renewed - The last 5 years are emphasized in track record assessment

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