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- There is no perfect review system
Jop de Vrieze wrote the article entitled "Funders groan under growing review burden" (1). Although a reviewer has his/her limited knowledge or expertise, the reviewer is forced to evaluate the grant applications. Because of the limited expertise, the reviewer is not able to achieve fair evaluation of the drastic grant applications which are out of his/her scope. Grant application review is similar to paper peer review. Derek Lowe also stated that great papers that have been rejected (2). Imagine a Venn diagram composed of N sets where N is the number of reviewers. Intersection (overlapping region) means sharing the same expertise between reviewers. Sparse means dogmatic evaluation. Therefore, we should carefully select reviewers with keeping the density of intersections equal for fair evaluation. Or randomly we should pick a certain percentage of grant applications regardless of reviewers' evaluations.
References:
1. Jop de Vrieze, "Funders groan under growing review burden", Science 28 Jul 2017: Vol. 357, Issue 6349, pp. 343
2. Derek Lowe, Great Papers That Have Been Rejected, September 10, 2013
http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2013/09/10/great_papers_th...Competing Interests: None declared.
