ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2018
Low agreement among reviewers evaluating the same NIH grant applications.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 50 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
50 citing papers in PubMed.
- Applicants as reviewers: a mixed methods evaluation of the risks, benefits, and potential of distributed peer review for grant funding allocations.Research integrity and peer review · 2026Article
- How contemporary academic structures constrain scientific creativity and hold back early-career researchers.Nature human behaviour · 2026Review
- Homophily in grant evaluations.Nature human behaviour · 2026Article
- Article
- Gender and disciplinary differences in grant proposal peer review: Content and sentiment in 39,280 reports.PloS one · 2026Article
- Building strong grant writers in academic medicine: outcomes of early-career faculty enrolled in the University of California San Diego Health Sciences Grant Writing Course.Academic medicine : journal of the Association of American Medical Colleges · 2026Article
- Lottery before peer review is associated with increased female representation and reduced estimated economic cost in a German funding line.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Early career setback and future achievement in professional sports.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Communities Started the End of the HIV Epidemic: Experiences With and Recommendations for Conducting Community-Engaged HIV Implementation Research.Journal of acquired immune deficiency syndromes (1999) · 2025Article
- Threats to grant peer review: a qualitative study.BMJ open · 2025Article
- Alternative models of funding curiosity-driven research.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Article
- The costs of competition in distributing scarce research funds.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Peer review trends in six fisheries science journals.Research integrity and peer review · 2024Article
- Empirically Derived Principles for Research Funding Success: A Primer for Early Career Academic Investigators.International journal of radiation oncology, biology, physics · 2024Article
- An experimental study of simulated grant peer review: Gender differences and psychometric characteristics of proposal scores.PloS one · 2024Article
- A new approach to grant review assessments: score, then rank.Research integrity and peer review · 2023Article
- Article
- Can't We Do Better? A cost-benefit analysis of proposal writing in a competitive funding environment.PloS one · 2023Article
- Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
8 authors.
Funding
Abstract
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.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.