Exploring the Science of Scientific Review

描述（由申请人提供）：所有人——无论多么聪明、平等主义或善意——在做决定和判断他人的方式上都容易受到认知偏见的影响。尽管这些偏见可能在无意中与一个人的有意识意图、个人信仰和客观数据相抵触，但它们可能在无意中使社会不平等永久化。种族和性别在R01资助结果中无法解释的差异引起了人们对NIH同行评审中存在偏见的担忧。这个变革性的R01将通过以下三个具体目标来检查R01同行评审中是否以及如何发生隐性（即无意的）偏见：确定研究者特征对R01同行审稿人选择的词语和描述符的影响程度，以及文本与指定分数的关系。我们将验证积极和消极的拨款评价词类别，分析全国R01评论样本的文本，并比较不同研究者特征的拨款评论文本。我们假设，即使在申请分数和资助结果相似的情况下，词汇和描述符的类别也会因申请人种族和性别的不同而暗示不同的评估标准。具体目标2。确定研究者的种族、性别或机构是否会对相同提案的审查产生因果影响。我们

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): All humans-no matter how intelligent, egalitarian, or well-intentioned-are susceptible to cognitive biases in the way they make decisions and judge others. Although these biases can operate unintentionally in opposition to one's conscious intentions, personal beliefs, and objective data, they may unwittingly perpetuate social inequalities. Unexplained disparities in R01 funding outcomes by race and gender have raised concern about bias in NIH peer review. This Transformative R01 will examine if and how implicit (i.e., unintentional) bias might occur in R01 peer review through the following three Specific Aims: Specific Aim #1. Identify the extent to which investigator characteristics influence the words and descriptors chosen by R01 peer-reviewers and how text relates to assigned scores. We will validate positive and negative grant evaluation word categories, analyze the text of a national sample of R01 reviews, and compare the grant review text for different investigator characteristics. We hypothesize that categories of words and descriptors will differ in ways that suggest implicitly different evaluation standards by applicant race and gender, even when application scores and funding outcomes are similar. Specific Aim #2. Determine whether investigator race, gender, or institution causally influences the review of identical proposals. We will conduct a randomized, controlled study in which we manipulate characteristics of a grant principal investigator (PI) to assess their influence on grant review outcomes. We will request donations of actual funded R01s and, within each grant, manipulate the PI's gender, race, or home institution. We will then invite reviewers in the appropriate discipline to review the proposals, and we will analyze written reviews and scores. We hypothesize that investigator variables will significantly influence scores and review text such that grants attributed to higher status groups (male, White, prestigious institution) will obtain better scores and text will suppor implicitly different standards of excellence. Specific Aim #3. Examine how interactional patterns among study section members promote receptivity and resistance to discussion topics and associated grant applicants. In audio- and videotapes of constructed study sections, we will investigate the real-time social interactional processes in the discussions of R01 proposals. We will employ conversation analysis to examine the delivery of initial rankings and their rationales, topic development, and the processes through which final rankings are negotiated. This research is innovative because it examines for the first time the complexities of potential bias in NIH peer review. The potential impact is threefold; this research will 1) discover whether certain forms of cognitive bias are or are not consequential in R01 peer review, 2) determine whether quantitative text analysis is a useful measure of implicit bias, and 3) describe and label real-tim grant reviewer interactional patterns. Taken together, the results of our research could set the stage for transformation in peer review throughout NIH.