Matthew
Narratives
GRAIL
Funder Data Platform
AGORRA
Undisciplined
Peer Review
Portfolios
MetaROR
AFIRE
19 March 2025 08:00 PDT / 15:00 GMT / 16:00 CET
Scientists and funding agencies invest considerable resources in writing and evaluating grant proposals. But do grant proposal texts noticeably change panel decisions in single blind review?
We report on a field experiment conducted by The Dutch Research Council (NWO) in collaboration with the authors in an early-career competition for awards of 800,000 euros of research funding. A random half of panelists were shown a CV and only a one-paragraph summary of the proposed research, while the other half were shown a CV and a full proposal. We find that withholding proposal texts from panelists did not detectibly impact their proposal rankings. This result suggests that the resources devoted to writing and evaluating grant proposals may not have their intended effect of facilitating the selection of the most promising science.
Müge Simsek is an Assistant Professor of Sociology in the programme group Institutions, Inequalities and Life Courses at the University of Amsterdam. She earned her PhD from Utrecht University in 2019 and completed postdoctoral research at both Utrecht University and the Netherlands Interdisciplinary Demographic Institute. Prior to her current role, she worked as a lecturer at University College Groningen. Her research centers on the integration processes of immigrants and their offspring, with a particular emphasis on the role of religion. In parallel, she maintains a secondary research agenda focused on the organization of science and inequality within academia.