Message for Early Investigators Seeking Grant Funding - Never Give Up

Found this in last week's Economist (print edition), suggesting that early investigators are not at an insurmountable disadvantage when competing for funds against established investigators - as long as they keep trying.  Something I need to keep remembering myself...

https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2019/05/11/in-science-grit-counts-as-well-as-talent

Full text below:

Economist, Never Give Up - Success in academia, 2019

In science, grit counts as well as talent

New research confirms the value of an old proverb

Print edition | Science and technology

May 9th 2019

IN 1968 ROBERT MERTON, a sociologist at Columbia University, identified a feature of academic life that he called the Matthew effect. The most talented scientists, he observed, tend to have access to the most resources and the best opportunities, and receive a disproportionate amount of credit for their work, thus amplifying their already enhanced reputations and careers. Less brilliant ones, meanwhile, are often left scrambling for money and recognition. Or, as St Matthew puts it (Chapter 13, verse 12), “For whosoever hath, to him shall be given, and he shall have more abundance: but whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken away even that he hath.”

The Matthew effect is undoubtedly real. But a more recent piece of research, by Yang Wang, Benjamin Jones and Dashun Wang of Northwestern University, in Illinois, suggests Matthew’s verse is not the only relevant aphorism. Another, “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try, try again”, also seems to be true.

The Drs Wang (who are unrelated) and Dr Jones discovered this by collecting data on grant applications. In particular they examined those submitted between 1990 and 2005 to America’s National Institutes of Health (NIH) by junior-level scientists. Rather than analyse every proposal, they focused on two groups of applicants: those who received relatively high scores on their submissions but just missed getting a grant, and those who scored similarly well but just succeeded in being awarded one.

The three researchers found that, rather than automatically holding the failures back, as the Matthew effect might be thought to predict, an early-career setback of this sort was sometimes associated with greater academic success in the long run. Those in the sample who missed out on funding were more likely to drop out altogether from the NIH system than those who won it. That came as no surprise. 

What did surprise was that those in the near-miss group who persevered and continued to apply for grants after their initial failure outperformed their counterparts who had succeeded first time, as measured by the number of citations of their research that they received over the subsequent ten years. On average, they garnered, over that period, 36% more citations and published 39% more “hit” papers (those with citations in the top 5%) than their near-win counterparts.

True grit

While some of this can be explained by the weakest scientists in the no-grant group giving up, something else is going on as well. The three researchers showed this by removing the lowest-performing scientists from the group that had won grants until its dropout rate matched that of the group that had not. That done, they found that there was still a significant gap between the subsequent performances of the two groups. They thus conclude that other, unobservable, characteristics are at work—the sort of stuff that laymen refer to as “effort” or “grit”.