Use of Promotional Language in Grant Applications and Grant Success.

Importance: Scientific writing is critical for successfully showing the merits of innovative ideas to funding agencies, colleagues, and practitioners, and it has evolved over time, particularly in the increased use of promotional words.

Objectives: To evaluate whether promotional language in biomedical grant writing is associated with receipt of funding and to assess who uses promotional language in their grant applications, after accounting for principal investigators (PIs), grants, and other confounders.

Design, Setting, And Participants: This cross-sectional study uses previously collected data on 2439 funded and rejected National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant applications from 2007 to 2019 and 9096 funded and rejected Novo Nordisk Foundation (NNF) biomedical grant applications from 2015 to 2022, bibliographic data on the publications of each PI from OpenAlex, and fixed-effects regression analysis.

Promotional language and the adoption of innovative ideas in science.

How are the merits of innovative ideas communicated in science? Here, we conduct semantic analyses of grant application success with a focus on scientific promotional language, which may help to convey an innovative idea's originality and significance. Our analysis attempts to surmount the limitations of prior grant studies by examining the full text of tens of thousands of both funded and unfunded grants from three leading public and private funding agencies: the NIH, the NSF, and the Novo Nordisk Foundation, one of the world's largest private science funding foundations. We find a robust association between promotional language and the support and adoption of innovative ideas by funders and other scientists.