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  • Local versus global inter-rater reliability for evaluating the internal validity of grant peer review: Considerations of measurement
Title: Local versus global inter-rater reliability for evaluating the internal validity of grant peer review: Considerations of measurement
In the absence of gold standard for evaluating quality of peer review, considerable attention has been focused on studying reviewer agreement via inter-rater reliability (IRR) which can be thought of as the correlation between scores of different reviewers given to the same grant proposal. Noting that it is not uncommon for IRR in grant peer review studies to be estimated from some range-restricted subset of submissions, we use statistical methods and data analysis of real peer review data to illustrate behavior of such local IRR estimates when only fractions of top-quality proposal submissions are considered. We demonstrate that local IRR estimates are smaller than those obtained from all submissions and that zero local IRR estimates are quite plausible. We note that, from a measurement perspective, when reviewers are asked to differentiate among grant proposals across the whole range of submissions, only IRR measures that correspond to the complete range of submissions are warranted. We recommend against using local IRR estimates in those situations. Moreover, if review scores are intended to be used for differentiating among top proposals, we recommend peer review administrators and researchers to align review procedures with their intended measurement.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1759825
PAR ID:
10272380
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
2nd International Conference on Peer Review
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
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