On recruiting peers to review NIH grants

May 2015 Advisory Council round for the CSR of NIH.

I’ll be making observations on the Luci Roberts presentation in a little while. For now, enjoy.

UPDATE:

Okay, down to business. The part I wanted to highlight starts at 1:35 of the videocast. Dr. Nakamura introduces Luci Roberts, Director of Planning and Evaluation in the OER.

A comment from baltogirl

It is a little known fact that SROs have trouble recruiting for study section (I was told that two-thirds of people asked decline to serve). It’s likely that most people are so busy writing their own grants they can’t take a full month off to devote to reading the work of others.

reminded me I forgot to discuss these data.

The Division of Planning and Evaluation conducted a survey** some time ago, trying to determine the attitudes of extramural PIs that would affect their willingness to serve on study sections. I thought it applied to the above comment.
They surveyed 4,000 individuals who had submitted at least one grant as PI in the past five years and who had obtained active funding (any variety) from the NIH in the past five years. 1830 or 46% responded. Not too shabby. (They also surveyed 423 SROs of which 271/64% responded, more on that later.) Of the PIs 1,616 had served as PIs or PDs, the balance were TG directors or subproject/consortium PIs.

First up. 964 (53%) had never been asked to serve on study section in the 12 months prior to the survey. Hmm. I can almost stop right here. But no….there’s much more. Still, if there is a reviewer crunch, the first order of business is to determine why over half the potential pool is not even being asked.

Ok, of the remaining 866 individuals who were asked to serve on study section, 762 agreed to do so. That’s 88% saying yes. So the rumor that “two-thirds of people asked decline to serve” is falsified by this survey. Clearly, the vast majority of people who are asked step up and do their community duty.

I really, really like this. It is heartening.

The next most-interesting thing was the 10th slide which shows the ranks of PIs who are asked/not asked to review. As you would expect, the Full/Associate/Assistant Professor ranks for those asked ran 54%/32%/11% (that high for Assistants?) and 22%/23%/37% for those not asked to serve.

Again, this outcome makes it really clear what needs to be done if getting reviewers is a problem. Ask more Assistant Professors to serve***. Right? Done.

Then we get into a couple of slides on why people might say “no” when asked to review. Slide 11 present the top reasons (out of an open text box response, per Roberts’ presentation) for the process being “more burdensome than it could be”. The numbers are confused here because the denominator appears to be 861 when it should be 762. But in any case, 630 of the respondents who reviewed said the process was not more burdensome than necessary (huh? surprised on this one). Of the 158 who said it was too burdensome, 45% complained about the number of assigned applications. The next most common (16%) complaint was “too much time devoted to applications that will never fund”. So pretty much, the most burdensome thing was review load.

This brings us to Slide 13 which pits SRO opinion versus how reviewers think. One of the biggest disconnects was in the number of in-person meetings per year that is “reasonable” since reviewers lean 1-2 and SROs were about evenly split between 1-2 and 3-4 as okay. A similar disconnect was found on application load. Half of the reviewers felt 4-6 apps was a reasonable load and only 25% felt 7-9 was reasonable. SROs leaned 7-9 (~60% of SROs) with less than 40% finding a 4-6 grant load reasonable.

Predictably.

I’m skipping Slide 12 on reviewer and SRO thoughts on reason to accept and decline invitations to review since 88% of those asked say yes anyway. Who cares what they say if most of them will do it just for the asking?

Okay, those were the things that jumped out at me.

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*As a disclosure, Dr. Roberts was once a SRO who played a highly formative role in the early-career understanding of the NIH grant business for YHN. She was kind enough to send me the slide deck that was used in her presentation.

**I was a respondent, fwiw.

***In case of any newcomers, both YHN and CPP have advocated for this on this blog since forever.