"A random half of panelists were shown a CV and only a one-paragraph summary of the proposed research, while the other half were shown a CV and a full proposal. We find that withholding proposal texts from panelists did not detectibly impact their proposal rankings" link.springer.com/article/10.1...
Scientists and funding agencies invest considerable resources in writing and evaluating grant proposals. But do grant proposal texts noticeably change panel decisions in single blind review? We report...
This is maybe cynical, but I had generally been assuming that long arduous grant proposals were primarily to discourage applications so there would be less for the agency to review. Not the only reason of course, but a desirable externality for the agency (but bad for all of us)
My university’s proposal mentor program is focused only on the first “summary” page for precisely this reason.
I would love to know the results of reviewing full proposals without a CV. It seems odd that we increasingly move toward double-masked reviewing of manuscripts but worry so much less about biases when handing out the funding to do said research.
But couldn’t the conclusion also be that writing a full proposal helps create superior one-paragraph summaries? I know my summaries are always magnitudes better after the painstaking efforts required to write a full proposal.