A new approach to grant review assessments: score, then rank

BACKGROUND: In many grant review settings, proposals are selected for funding on the basis of summary statistics of review ratings. Challenges of this approach (including the presence of ties and unclear ordering of funding preference for proposals) could be mitigated if rankings such as top-k preferences or paired comparisons, which are local evaluations that enforce ordering across proposals, were also collected and incorporated in the analysis of review ratings. However, analyzing ratings and rankings simultaneously has not been done until recently. This paper describes a practical method for integrating rankings and scores and demonstrates its usefulness for making funding decisions in real-world applications. METHODS: We first present the application of our existing joint model for rankings and ratings, the Mallows-Binomial, in obtaining an integrated score for each proposal and generating the induced preference ordering. We then apply this methodology to several theoretical “toy” examples of rating and ranking data, designed to demonstrate specific properties of the model. We then describe an innovative protocol for collecting rankings of the top-six proposals as an add-on to the typical peer review scoring procedures and provide a case study using actual peer review data to exemplify the output and how the model can appropriately resolve judges’ evaluations. RESULTS: For the theoretical examples, we show how the model can provide a preference order to equally rated proposals by incorporating rankings, to proposals using ratings and only partial rankings (and how they differ from a ratings-only approach) and to proposals where judges provide internally inconsistent ratings/rankings and outlier scoring. Finally, we discuss how, using real world panel data, this method can provide information about funding priority with a level of accuracy in a well-suited format for research funding decisions. CONCLUSIONS: A methodology is provided to collect and employ both rating and ranking data in peer review assessments of proposal submission quality, highlighting several advantages over methods relying on ratings alone. This method leverages information to most accurately distill reviewer opinion into a useful output to make an informed funding decision and is general enough to be applied to settings such as in the NIH panel review process.