TY  - JOUR
AU  - Azoulay, Pierre
AU  - Zivin, Joshua S. Graff
AU  - Manso, Gustavo
TI  - NIH Peer Review: Challenges and Avenues for Reform
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 18116
PY  - 2012
Y2  - June 2012
DO  - 10.3386/w18116
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w18116
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w18116.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Pierre Azoulay
MIT Sloan School of Management
100 Main Street, E62-487
Cambridge, MA 02142
Tel: 617/258-9766
Fax: 617/253-2660
E-Mail: pazoulay@mit.edu

Joshua S. Graff Zivin
University of California, San Diego
9500 Gilman Drive, MC 0519
La Jolla, CA 92093-0519
Tel: 858/822-6438
E-Mail: jgraffzivin@ucsd.edu

Gustavo Manso
Haas School of Business
University of California at Berkeley
545 Student Services Building #1900
Berkeley, CA 94720
E-Mail: manso@haas.berkeley.edu
M1  - published as Pierre Azoulay, Joshua S. Graff Zivin, Gustavo Manso. "National Institutes of Health Peer Review: Challenges and Avenues for Reform," in Josh Lerner and Scott Stern, editors, "Innovation Policy and the Economy, Volume 13" University of Chicago Press (2013)

M3  - presented at "Innovation Policy and the Economy 2012", April 17, 2012
AB  - The National Institute of Health (NIH), through its extramural grant program, is the primary public funder of health-related research in the United States. Peer review at NIH is organized around the twin principles of investigator initiation and rigorous peer review, and this combination has long been a model that science funding agencies throughout the world seek to emulate. However, lean budgets and the rapidly changing ecosystem within which scientific inquiry takes place have led many to ask whether the peer-review practices inherited from the immediate post-war era are still well-suited to twenty first century realities. In this essay, we examine two salient issues: (1) the aging of the scientist population supported by NIH and (2) the innovativeness of the research supported by the institutes. We identify potential avenues for reform as well as a means for implementing and evaluating them.
ER  -