Peer review and the ex ante assessment of societal impacts

Funding agencies and research councils around the world rely on peer review to assess the potential impacts of proposed research. This article compares the procedures of two major public science agencies - the US National Science Foundation and the European Commission's 7th Framework Programme - for evaluating ex ante the potential societal impact of research proposals. In this paper we survey the state of the art and discuss some of the conceptual questions that arise in using ex ante peer review to assess the societal impact of scientific research.