Which of the new NIH review criteria is most important?

This is an important question, and one that is worth considering when preparing your NIH grant proposal. The five review criteria include significance, investigator, innovation, approach, and environment. Since the new criteria have only been in use for a relatively short period of time, it is still too early to determine the most important of the review criteria. However, as this very interesting post explains, National Institute of General Medical Sciences Director Jeremy Berg is attempting to use science to make this determination. Using NIGMS data, Dr. Berg is examining trends in grant reviews in an attempt to determine which criteria have been most important in determining review outcomes. So far, Dr. Berg's work has focused only on NIGMS proposals, and only on one round of reviews. The current analysis shows that significance and approach appear to be the most important factors in determining impact score. It will be very interesting to see if that changes when another round of reviews are factored in. Stay tuned.