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Peer review

For all that science is a data-based enterprise, scientists don’t have the data on whether peer review really does end up funding the best research. “If you were a congressperson or a taxpayer, you might say ‘show me some data that peer review is good at picking things that turn out to be important,’” says Jeremy Berg, a biochemist at the University of Pittsburgh. “But until this study was done, the answer was ‘we believe it but we can’t prove it.’ As scientists, that’s kind of embarrassing.”

When a scientist wants to get NIH funding for a study, she writes up a grant proposal that reports results from preliminary studies, gives goals for the project, outlines the future experiments and estimates the time and resources they will require. The researcher submits her grant, and it’s assigned to a study section of 20 to 30 researchers who work in disciplines closely related to that of the grant proposal.

Within the study section, the grant will be assigned to three reviewers, two of whom provide detailed comments, and a reader, who provides additional comments. The reviewers will give the grant an overall score based on five criteria: Significance, scientific approach, potential innovation, the proposing scientist’s skills and whether the researcher’s university has the resources to support the work. About 40 to 50 percent of grants will be “triaged” at this stage. The rest go to the study section as a whole. After about 10 to 15 minutes of discussion, the grants receive final rankings by priority, with the lowest scores being the best and most likely to be funded.