Authors weigh costs and benefits of applying for grants

In an 2015 article in PLOS One that has been making the rounds lately, Ted and Courtney von Hippel report on a three-year study looking at 195 scientists and social scientists submitting a total of 287 federal research proposals. On average, they found that each proposal took 116 hours of work for the PIs, and an additional 55 hours of Co-Investigators' time. Was it worth it? On the whole, they calculated that each additional proposal submitted in a year increased the chances of being funded, but beyond that, participants in their study reported that even when unfunded, the experience of writing a proposal benefitted them in other ways such as helping to create new collaborations, fine-tune scientific thinking or train grad students and/or post-docs. You can read the entire article here: https://tinyurl.com/ycny2f82.