High-scoring grant applications yield more highly cited papers

Did they control for the fact that low score means no (or less) funding, and that makes it more difficult to produce results? This sounds obvious, but it's not mentioned as a factor in the linked page...

It would have been a lot more useful to also know how a percentile increase on the review score translated into a percentile increase on the citation distribution. We already the citations are highly skewed from a winner-take-all dynamic, so even if you just barely increase your chance of funding the top paper as opposed to the second-to-top paper, your expected number of citations might jump a lot.

Of course, if you think citations are roughly proportional to scientific value, then this doesn't matter. The absolute number of citations is the important thing, and it really is worth it to eek out a slightly higher chance of funding the top paper. But if you believed that, you'd think from the exponential explosion in citations that science today is vastly more valuable than even a few years ago, and that physics hadn't stopped making much progress back around 1970....

Sometimes good science turns up null results or even worse, not interesting results. These works tend to not get cited but are still important when they're exploring new science or attempting to solve challenging problems. I don't see what the problem is.