Can word patterns from grant abstracts predict National Science Foundation (NSF) funding? The data describe a clear relationship between word patterns and funding magnitude: Grant abstracts that are longer than the average abstract, contain fewer common words, and are written with more verbal certainty receive more money. 

The National Institutes of Health uses small groups of scientists to judge the quality of the grant proposals that they receive, and these quality judgments form the basis of its funding decisions.  In order for this system to fund the best science, the subject experts must, at a minimum, agree as to what counts as a “quality”proposal.  We investigated the degree of agreement by leveraging data from a recent experiment with 412 scientists.

New study of NIH funding says women overall get smaller grants than men, even when controlling for research potential. The findings have implications for their long-term success in academic science.

Using a structured systematic comparative approach, this study analyses differences in basic research grant funding between the main academic research funding agency of Germany and the main agencies of five other countries, including the Swiss National Science Foundation. 

This article in The Lancet suggests that a traditional, project-based grant review process outperforms the increasingly popular people-not-project funding schemes.

This study presents a review of international evidence on best practice in organisational design of research and innovation funding bodies.

Scientists waste substantial time writing grant proposals, potentially squandering much of the scientific value of funding programs. This Meta-Research Article shows that, unfortunately, grant-proposal competitions are inevitably inefficient when the number of awards is small, but efficiency can be restored by awarding funds through a modified lottery, or by weighting past research success more heavily in funding decisions.