This webpage has useful information for NIAMS scientific reviewers and other potential reviewers who wish to serve on a NIAMS review panel. Reviewers are part of the first level of peer review and are charged with evaluating the scientific and technical aspects of the applications. The scientific review group is comprised primarily of non-federal government scientists with expertise in relevant scientific disciplines and who have experience in the techniques or methods proposed and in the conduct of the study design. Reviewers are tasked with assessing the overall impact that the proposed project will likely have in advancing the field of biomedical research.
Reviewer Guidelines and Instructions
The NIH Office of Extramural Research (OER) has many useful resources. Maintaining confidentiality of the review meeting throughout the peer review process is essential and any information that is shared with the reviewers as part of the review meeting, and that is not available on the public domain should be considered confidential. Reviewers are required to sign a confidentiality certification before they can gain access to the assigned applications and related meeting materials.
Useful links:
Reviewer Responsibilities
Peer review of grant applications is at the heart of the NIH grants process. The reviewer is tasked with evaluating the scientific and technical merit of the applications scheduled for review. The reviewers are expected to provide a fair, objective, and independent assessment of the applications. At the review meeting, the reviewers will weigh in on the comments made at the discussion, and based on collective wisdom of the review panel, they will vote to identify applications that seem promising in advancing the field of science forward.
Some of the reviewer's responsibilities include:
- Familiarizing themselves with the Notice of Funding Opportunity (NOFO) and reading the review instructions and the applications.
- Alerting the SRO (as early as possible) if the reviewer identifies any conflict of interest with the assigned applications, and if the reviewer has any questions related to the assigned applications.
- Reviewing and certifying the pre-meeting conflict of interest form.
- Planning on attending the reviewer orientation prior to the review meeting.
- Evaluating the applications and providing fair and objective critiques, providing preliminary overall impact scores, and uploading the critiques and scores to the IAR website by the deadline.
- Participating in meeting-related activities, such as summarizing the application assigned to them for evaluation and highlighting the major strengths and weaknesses, participating in the discussion of other applications in the meeting that the reviewer is not in conflict with, listening to the presentations of other assigned reviewers, contributing as appropriate to the discussion, and providing final Overall Impact scores.
- Editing and re-uploading the critiques and scores (if necessary) as well as certifying the post-meeting conflict of interest form after the review meeting.
- Maintaining the confidentiality of the review proceedings, before, during, and after the meeting.