In recent times, this means that most grants — even those that score well — will not get funding. NIH has a current annual budget of around $30 billion, but that number has not kept pace with the increasing number of scientists applying for research money. In 2017, only about 16 percent of new applications were funded. This makes applying for grants more competitive, and thus makes it even more important that peer review is selecting the research with the highest potential payoff.
Agha and Danielle Li, an economist at Harvard University, wanted to determine whether peer review could successfully predict the influence of the subsequent research. They examined the funding scores for a total of 137,215 peer-reviewed grants funded between 1980 and 2008. For each of the grants, they hunted down how many published scientific studies or patents the grant yielded within five years of the grant’s success. Li and Agha also looked at how many citations the scientific studies for each grant had accrued.
As they assessed the scores and the grants’ success rates, the researchers tried to factor out the scientists’ institutions, previous funding, previous work and field of study. The results showed that grants with higher scores did, in fact, tend to have more patents and more highly-cited publications associated with them. For each 10-point drop in score, a grant was 19 percent less likely to produce a high-impact publication and 14 percent less likely to produce a patent. The economists report their findings April 23 in Science.
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