An experimental test of the effects of redacting grant applicant identifiers on peer review outcomes
- Retired, United States
- NIH/Center for Scientific Review, United States
- National Institutes of Health, United States
- Evaluact, Inc, United States
Abstract
Background: Blinding reviewers to applicant identity has been proposed to reduce bias in peer review.
Methods: This experimental test used 1200 NIH grant applications, 400 from Black investigators, 400 matched applications from White investigators, and 400 randomly selected applications from White investigators. Applications were reviewed by mail in standard and redacted formats.
Results: Redaction reduced, but did not eliminate, reviewers' ability to correctly guess features of identity. The primary, pre-registered analysis hypothesized a differential effect of redaction according to investigator race in the matched applications. A set of secondary analyses (not pre-registered) used the randomly selected applications from White scientists and tested the same interaction. Both analyses revealed similar effects: Standard format applications from White investigators scored better than those from Black investigators. Redaction cut the size of the difference by about half (e.g. from a Cohen's d of 0.20 to 0.10 in matched applications); redaction caused applications from White scientists to score worse but had no effect on scores for Black applications.
Conclusions: Grant-writing considerations and halo effects are discussed as competing explanations for this pattern. The findings support further evaluation of peer review models that diminish the influence of applicant identity.
Funding: Funding was provided by the NIH.
Data availability
All data analyzed for the findings presented in this manuscript are included in the supporting files
Article and author information
Author details
Mark D Lindner PhD
Funding
National Institutes of Health (none)
- Richard Nakamura
Employees of the NIH were involved in study design, in data analysis, data interpretation and manuscript writing. Data were collected, and major data analysis completed, by a contract research organization.
Reviewing Editor
- Mone Zaidi, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, United States
Ethics
Human subjects: All participants gave informed consent to participate in this study in accordance with a protocol that was approved on March 27, 2017 by the Social Solutions, Inc. IRB, (FWA 00008632), protocol #47.
Version history
- Received: June 17, 2021
- Preprint posted: June 28, 2021 (view preprint)
- Accepted: October 8, 2021
- Accepted Manuscript published: October 19, 2021 (version 1)
- Version of Record published: November 24, 2021 (version 2)
Copyright
This is an open-access article, free of all copyright, and may be freely reproduced, distributed, transmitted, modified, built upon, or otherwise used by anyone for any lawful purpose. The work is made available under the Creative Commons CC0 public domain dedication.
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An experimental test of the effects of redacting grant applicant identifiers on peer review outcomes
eLife 10:e71368.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.71368
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