Finding a funder and testing fit
Finding research funding means identifying suitable sources and checking the project against their priorities, eligibility rules and funding arrangements before preparing an application.
Funding routes and institutional support
Government funding may come from federal, state or local agencies; private sources include foundations, corporations and professional associations. An investigator-led grant usually starts with the applicant’s idea and allows some flexibility, while a contract funds work the agency wants done and brings greater control and financial accountability. Research and educational programmes can both depend on grant support, and losing funding can threaten the investigator’s team as well as the investigator’s position.
State or local contracts may pursue policy priorities rather than new knowledge; an investigator weighs salary support against the direction such work takes their research. Foundations can be regional, company-related, family-based or focused on a disease, and specialty societies and industry also offer support. Approaches to local or corporate foundations should be coordinated with the institution’s grants office: competing requests from one institution can confuse a funder or use up its willingness to make an award there. Company-sponsored multisite research may provide salary support while leaving investigators little control over the final paper and no authorship credit.
Clinician-scientists whose main focus is research commonly pursue mentored career-development funding, such as NIH K awards, followed by larger research-project awards, such as R or U awards. Clinicians fitting research around practice may instead use federal subcontracts, industry-sponsored multisite studies or smaller foundation, society or intramural grants.
Institutional support can include opportunity surveillance: in 2008 Wake Forest University Health Sciences made that service available to faculty, postdoctoral fellows and graduate students through its Research Support Core.
In 2018 NIH funding was described as more than US$30 billion annually, through about 50,000 competitive grants to more than 300,000 investigators in roughly 2,500 institutions. Between 2006 and 2014 the number of NIH-funded trials fell by 24%, while its inflation-adjusted budget fell by 14%. A comparison reported in 2018 of NIH review outcomes found physicians competed favourably, but clinical-research applications had modestly less favourable outcomes than laboratory research.
Opportunity searches and alerts
Funding announcements may leave only a few weeks before submission, so waiting passively risks discovering opportunities too late or missing them. A medical writer can design a search strategy and may maintain it and alert investigators to matches.
In 2023 Grants.gov collected announcements from NIH, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, other Department of Health and Human Services bodies, the Department of Defense and other agencies, with filters for agency, category and dates. NIH’s database also offered activity-code and institute filters, and both databases supported saved-search email alerts. A 2017 orientation to US funding also highlighted Department of Justice research, the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute and National Science Foundation basic-science funding, recommending agency websites for their changing requirements, page limits and letter-of-intent procedures.
Private societies and foundations may announce grants annually, semiannually or unpredictably, including one-off opportunities. Their websites and occasional mailing lists can be monitored, although this becomes inefficient across many funders or investigators. Subscription databases gather opportunities from private, government and international funders, with filters and alerts for interests, deadlines, budgets and geography; institutional access should be checked before buying a subscription.
The subscription services listed in 2023 were:
- Funding Institutional
- GrantForward
- GrantScape — individual subscriptions indicated
- GrantSelect — individual subscriptions indicated
- Pivot-RP
- SPIN
A 2018 list of funding resources included AHRQ’s Grants On-Line Database, NIH RePORT, the Federal Register, the Foundation Center, Grants.gov, HRSA and NIH’s Office of Extramural Research. In 2010 ScanGrants listed grants, scholarships, fellowships, prizes, travel awards and abstract, essay and poster awards, concentrating mainly on private and nonprofit sources because federal and state information was available elsewhere.
Funders identified through publications
A bibliographic search can identify candidate funders in a specialised subfield by examining publications’ funding information. A 2019 example searched Web of Science’s Science Citation Index Expanded for 2017 articles with the keyword “cancer”, restricted to papers with at least one author in the then 28 EU countries or 16 Horizon 2020 associated countries. It found 28,944 articles, of which 20,099 contained funding information.
The leading funding organisations by publication count in that analysis were:
| Funding organisation | Publications |
|---|---|
| European Union | 2,098 |
| German Research Foundation | 1,105 |
| Italian Association for Cancer Research | 833 |
| Swedish Research Council | 541 |
| Swedish Cancer Society | 538 |
| Cancer Research UK | 446 |
| Carlos III Institute of Health, Spain | 353 |
| Dutch Cancer Society | 350 |
| Foundation for Science and Technology, Portugal | 336 |
| Swiss National Science Foundation | 329 |
| Medical Research Council, UK | 258 |
Other funders included companies, agencies outside the selected countries such as the US NIH, and small organisations.
Eligibility and priorities
A request for proposals describes eligible projects, instructions, funding caps and deadlines, and may give priority points to specified features. The project’s exact fit should be checked before outlining the proposal, including the meaning of terms defining the target population. A well-written proposal can be ineligible because it includes people outside the funded population. Research funders should be distinguished from education and training funders, with combined projects discussed with the programme officer early. Unusually restrictive requirements may signal that another institution already has an inside track. Projects and budgets should stay within the investigator’s demonstrated capability before more ambitious applications are attempted.
Previous awards and programme-officer advice
Previous successful applications can provide models when similar funding initiatives recur, and summaries identify investigators and the work supported. In 2018 NIH RePORT supplied information on successful grants, while requesting a full application under the Freedom of Information Act involved contacting the relevant institute’s coordinator and expecting a processing fee. Private foundations generally supplied recent funded-project lists, with application authors a possible route to further detail.
The programme officer should be contacted early, preferably by telephone or in person, with a brief project description and thoughtful questions not already answered in the instructions. Suggested questions are:
- How well does the idea match the solicitation’s intent?
- What problems might it have?
- What else should be included?
- What could be done differently, and is there a fault in the thinking?
- What other suggestions does the officer have?
- What else should the investigator know?
Contact should continue as the proposal develops, with attention to warnings that the work falls outside the agency’s usual scope. The officer is supportive but does not make the funding decision, and encouragement does not predict approval.
Letters of intent
A requested letter of intent, concept paper or white paper lets both parties decide whether preparing a full proposal is worthwhile. The letter should follow the specified length and questions, with the idea discussed with the programme officer before submission. Where no format is prescribed, the suggested paragraph topics are:
- A two- or three-sentence project summary and its fit with the agency
- The problem and significance
- The approach and how it differs from previous efforts
- Why funds are needed and how they will be used
- Thanks, signature and full contact information