NIH peer review: Criterion scores completely account for racial disparities in overall impact scores.
Where this comes from
- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 32537494.
- Also identified by DOI 10.1126/sciadv.aaz4868 and PMC identifier 7269672.
- Licence recorded as CC BY.
- The licence permits redistribution, so the abstract is shown in full and the full text is available from the publisher.
Abstract
Previous research has found that funding disparities are driven by applications' final impact scores and that only a portion of the black/white funding gap can be explained by bibliometrics and topic choice. Using National Institutes of Health R01 applications for council years 2014-2016, we examine assigned reviewers' preliminary overall impact and criterion scores to evaluate whether racial disparities in impact scores can be explained by application and applicant characteristics. We hypothesize that differences in commensuration-the process of combining criterion scores into overall impact scores-disadvantage black applicants. Using multilevel models and matching on key variables including career stage, gender, and area of science, we find little evidence for racial disparities emerging in the process of combining preliminary criterion scores into preliminary overall impact scores. Instead, preliminary criterion scores fully account for racial disparities-yet do not explain all of the variability-in preliminary overall impact scores.