Journal
PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Volume 115, Issue 12, Pages 2952-2957Publisher
NATL ACAD SCIENCES
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1714379115
Keywords
peer review; social sciences; interrater reliability; linear mixed-effects models
Categories
Funding
- National Institute of General Medical Sciences of the National Institutes of Health [R01GM111002]
- Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research and Graduate Education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison
- Department of Medicine at the University of Wisconsin-Madison
Ask authors/readers for more resources
Obtaining grant funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) is increasingly competitive, as funding success rates have declined over the past decade. To allocate relatively scarce funds, scientific peer reviewers must differentiate the very best applications from comparatively weaker ones. Despite the importance of this determination, little research has explored how reviewers assign ratings to the applications they review and whether there is consistency in the reviewers' evaluation of the same application. Replicating all aspects of the NIH peer-review process, we examined 43 individual reviewers' ratings and written critiques of the same group of 25 NIH grant applications. Results showed no agreement among reviewers regarding the quality of the applications in either their qualitative or quantitative evaluations. Although all reviewers received the same instructions on how to rate applications and format their written critiques, we also found no agreement in how reviewers translated a given number of strengths and weaknesses into a numeric rating. It appeared that the outcome of the grant review depended more on the reviewer to whom the grant was assigned than the research proposed in the grant. This research replicates the NIH peer-review process to examine in detail the qualitative and quantitative judgments of different reviewers examining the same application, and our results have broad relevance for scientific grant peer review.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available