A question on my prior post wanted to know if my assertions were official and written or not.
DM, how do you know that this is the case? I mean, I don’t doubt that this is the case, but is it explicitly articulated somewhere?
This was in response to the following statements from me.
They are not charged with trying to help the PI improve his or her grantspersonship*. They are not charged with helping the PI get this particular grant funded on revision. They are not charged with being kind or nice to the PI. They are not charged with saving someone’s career.They are not charged with deciding what grants to fund!
The fact that we are not supposed to so much as mention the “f-word”, i.e., “funding”, has been communicated verbally by every single SRO I have ever reviewed under. They tend to do this at the opening of the meeting and sometimes in the pre-meeting introductory phone call. Many SROs of my acquaintance also spit this out like a reflex during the course of the meeting if they ever hear a reviewer mention it.
The rest of my statements are best evaluated as I wrote them. I.e., by looking at the the NIH review guidance material to see what the reviewers are instructed to do. There is a complete absence of any statements suggesting the job is to help out the applicant. There is a complete absence of any statement suggesting the job is to decide what to fund. The task is described assertively to:
Make recommendations concerning the scientific and technical merit of applications under review, in the form of final written comments and numerical scores.
As far as more positive assertions on the “fixing applications” front go, the most direct thing I can find at present is in the instruction on the “Additional Comments to Applicant” section of the critique template (take a look at that template if you’ve never reviwed). This document says:
As an NIH reviewer, your written critique should focus on evaluating the scientific and technical merit of an application and not on helping the applicant rewrite the application. But what if you desire to provide some information or tips to the applicant? The Additional Comments to Applicant box is designed just for that purpose.
My emphasis added. In case this isn’t clear enough, the following can be taken in the context of the other guidance document comments about reviewing the scientific and technical merit.
Your comments in this box should not be about the scientific or technical merit of an application; do not factor into the final impact score; are not binding; and do not represent a consensus by the review panel. But this type of information may be useful to an applicant.
Clear. Right? The rest of the review is not about being helpful. Comments designed to be helpful to the applicant are not to contribute to the scientific and technical merit review.
Now the comment also asked this:
What fraction of reviewers do you think understand it like you say?
I haven’t the foggiest idea. Obviously I think that there is no way anyone who is paying the slightest bit of attention could fail to grasp these simple assertions. And I think that probably, if challenged, the vast majority of reviewers would at least ruefully admit that they understand that helping the applicant is not the job.
But we are mostly professors and academics who have a pronounced native or professionally acquired desire to help people out. As I’ve said repeatedly on this blog, the vast majority of grant applications have at least something to like about them. And if academic scientists get a little tinge of “gee that sounds interesting”, their next instinct is usually “how would I make this better”. It’s default behavior, in my opinion.
So of course SROs are fighting an uphill battle to keep reviewers focused on what the task is supposed to be.
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