Braun Tibor, Schubert András (szerk.): Szakértői bírálat (peer review) a tudományos kutatásban : Válogatott tanulmányok a téma szakirodalmából (A MTAK Informatikai És Tudományelemzési Sorozata 7., 1993)

EUGENE GARFIELD: Refereeing and Peer Review. Part 3. How the Peer Review of Research-Grant Proposals Works and What Scientists Say About It

EUGENE GARFIELD: Refereeing and Peer Review. Part 3. How the Peer Review of Research-Grant Proposals Works and What Scientists Say About It Current Contents

, January 26,1987 This essay is the third in a series on refereeing and peer review in science. The first part examined the anecdotal evidence and other literature and opinions about refereeing, the evaluation of scholarly articles before publication.

1 The second discussed research on refereeing and suggestions for improving the system.

2 This part focuses on the workings of the peer-review system of evaluating research-grant proposals, as employed by major US federal funding agencies such as the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH); the fourth section will cover the research on the grant-review system and proposed alternatives to it. Tlie emphasis in Parts 3 and 4 is on peer review in the physical, chemical, and biological sciences, since those are the fields examined by the major studies sponsored by the NSF and the NIH. However, it should be noted that the social sciences and the arts and humanities also have funding mechanisms that incorporate peer review and that funding for science, the arts, and the humanities also comes from numerous private sources that have their own methods of determining the level of support they wish to provide. The Science-Government Connection The principle, if not the full-fledged system, of peer review developed along with the scholarly societies and learned journals that were founded in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

3.

4 But until this century, it remained a matter of interest and concern only within the scientific community. In the US, however, during the 1940s, science and government began to establish a close working relationship that went beyond the advisory role scientists had previously played in affairs of state. For instance, according to Jay A. Levy,

5 University of California School of Medicine, San Francisco, with the passage of the Public Health Service Act in 1944,

6 the US Surgeon General was authorized to "make grants-inaid to universities, hospitals, laboratories, and other public or private institutions and to individuals for...research."

5.

7 And in the late 1940s, according to Rustum Roy, director, Science, Technology and Society Program, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, the Office of Naval Research (ONR) was "the first systematically organized government source of research funds for universities."

8 At that time, "peer review began as an informal 'seeking of a second opinion' by the grants manager, who mailed a copy of a proposal on the periphery of his competence to a colleague and followed up with a phone call."

8 The close ties that evolved during World War II between the government and the scientific community were formalized in 1950 by the creation of the NSF.

9 According to former NSF director, psychologist Richard C. Atkinson, chancellor, University of California, San Diego, and physicist William A. Blanpied, currently international studies specialist at the NSF, the "science-government contract [was an attempt] to bring science into the political system while at the same time preserving its autonomy."

9 But Roy claims that in the process, each agen-