Post-submission Strategy, Revisited

Last week, the NIH Office of Extramural Research (the office that handles funding for researchers external to the NIH, which has its own intramural scientists and funding opportunities as well) posted a brief blog entry about the submission of patent citations post-submission (meaning, after the application has already been submitted) in its Extramural Nexus blog. However, I found the blog entry left out a key bit of strategy that I thought I would share with you here.

The salient part of the entry reads:

Yes. Citations of newly-received issued patents are allowable post-submission materials, because issuance of the patent is not in the control of the investigator.

A citation of a patent must include the names of the inventors, patent title, issued patent number (including country designation, e.g, US for USA), filing date, and the date the patent was issued:

Smith, Samuel S., and John J. Jones. Method of citing issued patents. US Patent #,###,###, filed December 31, 2015, and issued December 27, 2016.

I blogged about this previously, too, but wanted to reiterate that not only can you submit citations for newly received issued patents but you should AND you should be sure to update your bibliographic database (e.g., My Bibliography) with this information as soon as possible as well. Not only is it a strategic approach for your current applications, it also makes the process of writing future biosketches more efficient.

In fact, although what you can submit post-submission is limited, your ability to update your online bibliography is not limited by the deadline or guidelines for any one specific funding opportunity. You can and should be certain to consistently update your online bibliography upon the receipt of patents, the publication of articles, etc., in addition to submitting the citations as described above.

In that way, although your submitted biosketch sections cannot be directly amended to include and feature these citations (in, say, a Contributions to Science section), when these citations are added to your online bibliography, they can be viewed in the context of your body of work in the online bibliography by the people accessing that bibliography, including grant reviewers. And of course, keeping your online bibliography updated will make writing your future biosketches that much easier by obviating the last-minute shuffle to assure your information is current before your next deadline!

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