National Institutes of Health Peer Review: Challenges and Avenues for Reform
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w18116.pdf
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251.95 KB
Format
Adobe PDF
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Author(s)
Azoulay, Pierre
Graff Zivin, Joshua S.
Manso, Gustavo
Date Issued
January 2013
Journal
Innovation Policy and the Economy
Publisher
University of Chicago Press
Citation
Azoulay, Pierre et al. “National Institutes of Health Peer Review: Challenges and Avenues for Reform.” Innovation Policy and the Economy 13 (January 2013): 1–22 © 2013 The National Bureau of Economic Research
Version
Original manuscript
Abstract
The National Institute of Health (NIH), through its extramural grant program, is the primary public funder of health-related research in the United States. Peer review at NIH is organized around the twin principles of investigator initiation and rigorous peer review, and this combination has long been a model that science funding agencies throughout the world seek to emulate. However, lean budgets and the rapidly changing ecosystem within which scientific inquiry takes place have led many to ask whether the peer-review practices inherited from the immediate postwar era are still well suited to 21st-century realities. In this essay, we examine two salient issues: (1) the aging of the scientist population supported by NIH and (2) the innovativeness of the research supported by the institutes. We identify potential avenues for reform as well as a means for implementing and evaluating them.
MIT Department
Sloan School of Management
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1086/668237
