Advisory Council Updated on Strategies to Enhance NIH Peer Review

By: Yvette Seger
Wednesday, October 9, 2024
On September 23, the Center for Scientific Review (CSR) Advisory Council convened to discuss efforts across the spectrum of activities supporting peer review at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), from study section composition and strengthening peer review through reviewer and Scientific Review Officer (SRO) training to process for implementing forthcoming changes to the peer review framework.

As part of her Director’s Report, Noni Byrnes, PhD, CSR Director, reviewed progress toward implementing large-scale culture change to ensure a system of peer review that is rigorous and fair, with recent initiatives focusing on ways to optimize the process of peer review. In the past five years, strategies have included regular examination and restructuring of study sections, simplifying the peer review framework to focus reviewer efforts on the proposed science and reduce implicit bias, updating fellowship applications and review criteria to reduce institutional and mentor bias, and deployment of regular training programs to hone reviewer and SRO awareness of bias and strategies for mitigation. In addition, CSR has taken active steps to broaden the reviewer pool, the goal of which is to ensure representation of a range of perspectives and expertise in the peer review process.

Byrnes acknowledged that while these changes are necessary, they are not always well received by the community. To that point, she highlighted several strategies adopted by CSR to reduce undue influence on the review process. The first was to reduce the impact of “super-reviewers” – individuals who served as reviewers for more than 73 meetings over a 12-year span versus the majority who served in one to five meetings in the same span. A second strategy was to better balance the distribution of academic rank among study section members, with near parity among full and associate professors and 10 percent or less at the assistant professor rank. As part of this discussion, Byrnes also reviewed CSR’s processes for reviewing external input on reviewer slates and individual reviewers, noting that no such reporting mechanism was available prior to 2020.
In closing, Byrnes acknowledged that the pace of change has been rapid, but necessary to ensure NIH remains the “gold standard” for identifying the highest quality science in an environment free of bias. To achieve this goal, CSR continues to adopt data-driven strategies to improve peer review processes.

Archived materials from this meeting are available here.