Peer Review

Federal agencies throughout the government use peer review to evaluate research and other projects proposed for federal funding. Although peer review in principle has broad support, a long history of controversy has accompanied how it is practiced. The most contentious debates have centered on whether existing systems provide fair, impartial review of proposals. GAO examined grant selection in three federal agencies that use peer review: the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. This report focuses on the extent to which fairness problems occurred in three areas--the selection of peer reviewers, the scoring of proposals by reviewers, and the final funding decisions of agencies.

GAO found that: (1) peer review processes appear to be working well and are generally supported by peer reviewers; (2) although the three agencies have policies to prevent financial and institutional conflicts of interest, they cannot rigorously screen for professional conflicts of interest; (3) the more expertise reviewers have in a given subject, the more they are likely to know the applicants personally; (4) the agencies need to improve reviewer selection in the areas of academic standing, gender, and expertise; (5) peer reviewers inconsistently apply agency review criteria and rating scales and tend to use unwritten rules in rating proposals; (6) proposals submitted by women and minorities receive significantly lower scores than those submitted by men and whites; (7) the agencies vary in the importance of peer review scores to their final award decisions; and (8) an applicant with a strong publication track record is more likely to receive funding.

Recommendations

Our recommendations from this work are listed below with a Contact for more information. Status will change from "In process" to "Open," "Closed - implemented," or "Closed - not implemented" based on our follow up work.

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