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?"

Should I include images on my Specific Aims page?

As you work toward your next NIH grant application deadline, like many others you are probably painstakingly working to construct a Specific Aims page that will convey the importance of your work and excite the reviewers. You may even be wondering whether it would help your Aims page stand out if you include a figure on the page. If you are thinking of including any graphics on your Specific Aims page, there are several factors to consider.

First and foremost, there is a lot of information to cover on a Specific Aims page. You will need to clearly state the problem to be solved by your work, potential impact of the project, briefly summarize your preliminary data, and describe your overall objective, hypothesis, aims, and future directions. All of this needs to be packed into 1 page! Despite advice from well-meaning colleagues, the solution to meeting the page limit is not to condense your font spacing and remove spacing between paragraphs - this will only serve to make your text dense and difficult to read, potentially annoying the reviewers.

Sure, figures can be used in some cases to save space. However, for the Specific Aims page you are better served focusing on writing clearly and concisely, in a manner that is visually appealing, so the reviewers can quickly read the page and understand the key elements of your project. A summary figure that shows your project plan can be included at the end of the Significance section of your proposal. Images of preliminary data should be included in the Preliminary Data section of your Approach. This allows the figures to be placed in more detailed context and will maximize their impact. Just like overusing bold or underlined text, poorly placed figures can lose their effectiveness if not used appropriately.

As with all things grant related, there are exceptions. You may know someone with a funded proposal that included a figure on the Specific Aims page. However, I highly recommend keeping the aims page simple to enable reviewers to quickly read and understand your project without having to interpret a figure.

Grant application writing help - a technical checklist

The National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS) provides a very useful checklist to guide applicants in development of their grant applications.  The list, located here, is relevant to applicants to other NIH institutes as well.

Perhaps my favorite item on this list is in the Specific Aims section.  It states:
"Are they "win-win" - i.e., will an outcome consistent with the null hypothesis still be a contribution to the field?"
This question is something people often lose sight of as they develop grant applications.  I highly recommend using this checklist as a guide to improve the competitiveness of your NIH grant application.

NIAID provides questions to ask yourself when writing your aims

On this page, NIAID provides helpful information regarding proposal design, including crafting your aims.  A great list of questions to ask yourself after writing the first draft of your aims includes:

1. My reviewers would see my aims as tackling an important problem in a significant field.
2. They would view my aims as being innovative, but not too innovative.
3. My Specific Aims can test my hypothesis (or hypotheses).
4. They are doable within the grant period I am requesting.
5. The aims and hypothesis (or hypotheses) are concrete and well-focused.
6. I can define endpoints my peer reviewers will be able to assess.

For more helpful tips, view the NIAID NIH grant writing tutorials.

How to Write Specific Aims

Here are some great resources that I have come across that provide insight into how to develop and refine specific aims for your research project.  This presentation provides an overview and great examples of aims sections.  This article from NIAID also provides some helpful information, geared toward new investigators.  Remember: Specific Aims are NOT Methods!

Writing an R01 - Where to start

Question:

Dear Grant,
I am ready to write my first R01, but I am not sure how to get started. One of my colleagues said to start with the Methods, but another said that he always starts with the Budget. Who is right?

Answer:

My response to this question is- if it is working for them, and they are successfully obtaining funding, then they are both right. For you, however, my suggestion is to do neither. As a new investigator, your primary concern should be developing a viable hypothesis and clear, measurable Specific Aims. Your proposal will not be strong if it is not built on strong aims. When you have your aims drafted, show them to these
experienced researchers and solicit comments and feedback. Be prepared for some harsh criticism- you are better off hearing it now than in the peer review comments. Once your aims are narrowed down and finalized, you can begin to draft your methods and then budget. I suggest saving the abstract for last- it will be much easier to write when the rest of the proposal is already complete! Good luck!

Clearing up confusion over structuring of Research Strategy related to Specific Aims in NIH grant proposals

One of the most common questions I received from Principal Investigators when NIH released the new Research Strategy section guidelines was regarding Specific Aims. Though NIH has gone to great lengths to clarify the allowed structure of Research Strategy with regard to the aims, the question still seems to pop up.

Here is the official answer, right from the NIH Enhancing Peer Review site:

How I should organize the Research Strategy section to address the Significance, Innovation, and Approach for each Specific Aim, assuming I have more than one?

Applicants should use their discretion in organizing the information to best convey the desired information to the reviewers. For example, if an application had two specific aims, an applicant might choose to organize the Research Strategy in one of the following two ways:

Significance: Specific Aim 1, Specific Aim 2 Innovation: Specific Aim 1, Specific Aim 2 Approach: Specific Aim 1, Specific Aim 2

OR:

Specific Aim 1: Significance, Innovation, Approach Specific Aim 2: Significance Innovation, Approach

What should I write first?

After you review the lengthy proposal instructions (yes, you need to do this), your head will likely be spinning. "How am I going to get all of this done?", you may think, "And where do I begin?" A common mistake made by newer applicants is to begin by drafting the budget. This is actually one of the last pieces you should be worrying about.

To get started on your proposal outline, sit down and write out the specific aims that you hope to accomplish with this project. Use this process to jot down all of your ideas for the project, without regard to budget or other factors. Limit yourself to no more than 2 pages.

Then read the NIH instructions for the Specific Aims section:

• State concisely the goals of the proposed research and summarize the expected outcome(s), including the impact that the results of the proposed research will exert on the research field(s) involved.
• List succinctly the specific objectives of the research proposed, e.g., to test a stated hypothesis, create a novel design, solve a specific problem, challenge an existing paradigm or clinical practice, address a critical barrier to progress in the field, or develop new technology.
• Specific Aims are limited to one page.

Now look at your page again. How many aims have you proposed? Ideally, they should be narrowed down to no more than a handful, depending on the type and duration of project. There is a reason that NIH does not want to see more than a page worth of aims- one major complaint of reviewers is that some proposals attempt to do too much! Look at the ideas you have written down and determine which few are reasonable to expect to complete in your project's time period. Remember to focus on aims that are innovative but achievable.

Once you have completed a draft of your aims, be sure to discuss it with your collaborators and any experienced individuals in your field who may be willing to help. When you have something narrowed down that you are relatively happy with, I highly recommend talking to an NIH program officer. Typically an RFA has a contact person listed, and that may be a good place to start. If you know which institute or center your proposal will be likely to be assigned to, it can be very helpful to talk to someone there. All of the institutes and centers have websites that include contact information.