I’ve been meaning to pick up on a comment made by a reader over at writedit’s epic thread on NIH paylines, scores and whatall. (If you want to swap war stories and score/IC payline grumbling, that is the hot place in town.) The guy was ticked off about a recent review he received and had a question:
I am an establishe investigator. I subnitted a competing renewal … I got a score of 40 (37 percentile). I was very shocked and dissapointed to find out that my application had a preliminary score of 2.7 (which would have been fundable) but it seems one negative reviewer carried the day, and convinced others to pull down the score. I have not yet seen the comments, but if the comments have factual errors, especially from the negative errors, can I appeal the review and request a re-review?
Recently, as luck would have it, a loyal reader of the blog submitted the following scores, received on the review of her R01 grant proposal. Under the new scoring procedures in place since last June, these are scores which each reviewer suggests for criteria of Significance, Investigator, Innovation, Approach and Environment. I may have slightly re-ordered specific scores for concealment purposes but this is essentially the flavor.
rev#1: 2,1,1,1,1
rev#2: 2,2,3,3,1
rev#3: 3,2,5,4,2
It really is always Reviewer #3, isn’t it?