Does a zero inter-rater reliability mean grant peer review is arbitrary?

Abstrakt

ZÁKLADNÍ ÚDAJE: Does a zero inter-rater reliability mean grant peer review is arbitrary? [Metascience 2021. Virtual, 16.09.2021-25.09.2021]. ABSTRAKT: Are grant funding outcomes arbitrary? Those who argue “yes” often cite low inter-rater reliability (IRR) in grant peer review to support their claims. Inspired by a recent study that reported an IRR of zero in the mock peer review of top-quality grant proposals, we use real data from a complete range of submissions to the National Institutes of Health and to the American Institute of Biological Sciences to demonstrate that (1) estimating local IRR from subsets of restricted-quality proposals will likely result in zero estimates under many scenarios and (2) zero estimates of IRR are possible even when the true value is not zero. Zero estimates from range-restricted data should not be interpreted as indicating arbitrariness in peer review because, despite different scoring scales used by the two agencies, when complete ranges of proposals are considered, IRR estimates are above 0.6 which indicates good reviewer agreement.