Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Descriptive data suggest that grant applications from New Investigators, those who have not previously received substantial independent funding from NIH, are less likely to be funded. However, it is not well understood how much of this difference can be explained by different characteristics of NI versus Experienced Investigators (Exp). Therefore, we investigate if the presence of an NI on a grant is associated with reduced probability of receiving an award and generates science that is less impactful. We examine data from FY 2006-2017 and find that NI grant applications score worse during peer review, and even those funded tend to score 2 percentile points lower than experienced investigators. However, when examining the science – as measure by number of publications and relative impact of such publications – we find that funded NI perform similarly to experienced investigators.