Impact of Declining Proposal Success Rates on Scientific Productivity

TL;DR

Declining proposal success rates in fundamental sciences are mainly due to flat or decreasing agency budgets and a growing investigator population, not proposal merit or demographics, impacting scientific productivity and resource utilization.

Contribution

This paper provides statistical analysis and research insights explaining the causes of declining success rates and suggests an optimal success rate of 30-35% for healthy scientific competition.

Findings

Proposal success rates have declined despite stable proposal merit.

Investigator numbers have grown, increasing competition.

A success rate of 30-35% balances competitiveness and resource utilization.

Abstract

Over the last decade proposal success rates in the fundamental sciences have dropped significantly. Astronomy and related fields funded by NASA and NSF are no exception. Data across agencies show that this is not principally the result of a decline in proposal merit (the proportion of proposals receiving high rankings is largely unchanged), nor of a shift in proposer demographics (seniority, gender, and institutional affiliation have all remained unchanged), nor of an increase (beyond inflation) in the average requested funding per proposal, nor of an increase in the number of proposals per investigator in any one year. Rather, the statistics are consistent with a scenario in which agency budgets for competed research are flat or decreasing in inflation-adjusted dollars, the overall population of investigators has grown, and a larger proportion of these investigators are resubmitting meritorious but unfunded proposals. This White Paper presents statistics which support this conclusion, as well as recent research on the time cost of proposal writing versus that of producing publishable results. We conclude that an aspirational proposal success rate of 30-35% would still provide a healthily competitive environment for researchers, would more fully utilize the scientific capacity of the community's facilities and missions, and provide relief to the funding agencies who face the logistics of ever-increasing volumes of proposals.