Tips from NIH Institutes on How to Write a Specific Aims Page

The Specific Aims section is a key piece of almost all NIH proposal mechanisms.  Unfortunately, it is also a section that often causes stress and confuses researchers who are new to the grant proposal process. If you can write an excellent Specific Aims page, it will be easier to create a proposal with a logical flow from there. If your Aims are not clear and concise, you will find it more difficult to write the rest of your proposal and reviewers will find it more difficult to read it. Since it is unlikely that you want reviewers to need an ibuprofen or a cocktail after reading your proposal, some handy resources are included below.

The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS) both provide excellent tutorials on writing various aspects of grant proposals. In addition to guidance for Specific Aims, there are many more topics and examples of funded grant proposals available on the sites.

Draft Specific Aims provided by NIAID gives helpful advice on constructing and reviewing your aims and provides a handy proposal planning checklist to help guide you through the process. I also particularly like the questions they provide for Principal Investigators to ask themselves:

• Would my reviewers see my proposed project as tackling an important problem in a significant field?
• Would they view my Specific Aims as capable of opening up new discoveries in my field?
• Would my reviewers regard the work as new and unique?
• Would they view my Specific Aims as likely to exert a significant influence on the research field(s) involved?
• Are my Specific Aims written clearly and are they easy to understand?

Preparing the Research Plan: Writing Specific Aims provided by NINDS breaks down the development of specific aims into numbered steps, using the following outline:

• Step 1: Determine whether your research questions are exploratory (hypothesis-generating) or confirmatory (hypothesis-testing). If confirmatory, make sure the hypotheses are focused, testable, built on a solid scientific foundation, and important.
• Step 2: Draft aims to generate and/or test the hypotheses feasibly within the grant period.
• Usually a one-page limit.
• The aims should be focused and easy to assess by reviewers.
• For many mechanisms, consider avoiding interdependent aims.
• In drafting the specific aims, it can be informative to:
• Outline experiments and outcomes.
• Determine approximate personnel, resources, and timeline.
• Identify a potential funding institute and funding mechanism.
• Consider potential study sections and expertise of reviewers. 
• Assess feasibility of your proposed work within the proposed funding mechanism.
• Step 3: Revise aims as needed.

A paper from 2018 (Monte AA, Libby AM. Introduction to the Specific Aims Page of a Grant Proposal. Acad Emerg Med. 2018 Sep;25(9):1042-1047. doi: 10.1111/acem.13419. Epub 2018 May 7. PMID: 29608233; PMCID: PMC6133727) also illustrates an approach to breaking down each paragraph of the page. Although it was published a few years ago, the aims page has not changed since then. The approach outlined in the paper is similar to the structure I typically recommend using for a Specific Aims page, and the table provided in the paper works as a great guide for the initial stages of writing your first draft.

I hope you find these resources as helpful as I have for conceptualizing and writing your Specific Aims page for your next NIH grant application. Although writing the Aims page may be one of the most difficult parts of the application, a well-written page can excite the reviewers and inspire them to advocate for your proposal. 

For more advice about writing your Specific Aims, check out the prior post "Should I include images on my Specific Aims page?"