FLICKR, QUINN DOMBROWSKIJudgments made by peer reviewers about the merit of grant proposals submitted to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) aren’t predictive of the subsequent productivity of the research. That’s the conclusion of a recent study, published in eLife February 16, which analyzed the number of citations and publications resulting from funded projects.
“The excellent productivity exhibited by many projects with relatively poor scores and the poor productivity exhibited by some projects with outstanding scores demonstrate the inherent unpredictability of scientific research,” Ferric Fang of the University of Washington School of Medicine and coauthors wrote in their report.
Studies on the predictive power of peer-review panels have yielded a mixed bag of results—some show they are not very good at deciding which projects will be the most productive. Yet a recent review of more than 130,000 grant proposals found that peer reviewers’ high scores correlated well with research projects that would end up with the most publications, citations, and patents.
That study included all proposals (both the high- and low-ranked), but Fang’s team wanted to look only at ...
