NIH peer review percentile scores are poorly predictive of grant productivity

eLife

Anthony Bowen¹  Arturo Casadevall²  Ferric C Fang³ 

[1] Department of Microbiology and Immunology, Albert Einstein College of Medicine, New York, United States;Department of Molecular Microbiology and Immunology, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Baltimore, United States;Departments of Laboratory Medicine and Microbiology, University of Washington School of Medicine, Seattle, United States;

关键词: peer review;    research funding;    policy;    national institute of health;    grants;   

DOI  :  10.7554/eLife.13323

来源: DOAJ

【 摘 要 】

Peer review is widely used to assess grant applications so that the highest ranked applications can be funded. A number of studies have questioned the ability of peer review panels to predict the productivity of applications, but a recent analysis of grants funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in the US found that the percentile scores awarded by peer review panels correlated with productivity as measured by citations of grant-supported publications. Here, based on a re-analysis of these data for the 102,740 funded grants with percentile scores of 20 or better, we report that these percentile scores are a poor discriminator of productivity. This underscores the limitations of peer review as a means of assessing grant applications in an era when typical success rates are often as low as about 10%.

【 授权许可】

Unknown