[Analysis of methodological structure of research proposals submitted to the Health Care Research Fund]

Currently the methodological features of the applied-research grant proposals submitted to the Research Agencies are not well known while they play an important role in the evaluation process. The objectives of this work were to describe the methodological features and appropriateness in the fulfillment of a sample of proposals submitted to the Fondo de Investigación Sanitaria (FIS).

216 proposals submitted to the FIS in 1993 and 1994. A specific revision protocol was designed to assess the objectives of the study according with criteria drown from the scientific literature.

Most of the proposals correctly fulfill the items relative to the research problem description and justification. The operative component of the scientific method is scarcely fulfilled in the proposal hypothesis, objectives and methods. A 30% of the proposals do not show a typical research frame. The observational design and the basic field research are the most frequent findings in their items. The study variables, subjects, information management, plan of analysis and organization are incomplete or wrong filled in more than 50% of the proposals. The accepted proposals had an score of 1.93 in the degree of appropriate fulfillment and the non accepted 1.76, p = 0.001. The item with the strongest association to the acceptation was the appropriate definition of the variables, OR = 21.6 (CI 95%: 4.90-45.7).

The methodological structure is not appropriate in more than 50% of the proposals submitted to the FIS. The appropriateness in the fulfillment of the methodological features increase the probability of their acceptance.