A: All applications that come to the NIH actually come through the Center for Scientific Review (CSR), historically through the mailroom as well as more recently through electronic submission. Any application that is submitted is assigned to two places while at the Division of Receipt and Referral, CSR. One is a venue for review, and the other is to a potential funding institute such as NICHD or NIMH. Other than that, we have a big volume of referral guidelines, and the staff in the receipt and referral division know the areas of scientific interest for the different institutes. Even so, you can send a cover letter requesting a particular one, which is a good idea if you've have a strong idea of the fit of your research with a particular institute or been talking to a program officer. If a letter indicates the Institute and the program officer who feels that the application is a good match, and we would be perfectly happy to consider your input.

The Center for Scientific Review assigns for the review and carries out the majority of the peer review for the NIH. What makes it complex is that each NIH Institute has a review shop. That review shop tends to review specific initiatives or what we call mission-specific research, so they usually handle the center grants for that institute. They may elect to review their fellowships or their small grants or some other funding mechanisms, but the bulk of the applications are the investigator-initiated R01; that's our premier mechanism, and the majority are reviewed at the Center for Scientific Review where they're compared across institutes. We hope by that process we end up getting fair and thorough evaluations of the best science.

A: Within the Center for Scientific Review, we have 24 IRGs or Integrated Review Groups. Each IRG has four to twenty study sections. Within those groups, the chief is responsible for assigning to particular scientific review groups.

We have a number of different types of review committees. One is the standing study section. These have formal, chartered memberships with rules defined by the Federal Advisory Committees Act. Our nomination slates have to go through acomplex approval process that ends with the NIH Director. At every meeting though unexpected things happen, like a few regular reviewers can't attend or applications can't be reviewed by the regular reviewers because of conflict of interest. Therefore, every meeting has about half again as many temporary members who provide reviews, discuss the applications and vote scores.

Each application is assigned to a minimum of three individuals who serve as reviewers, or readers/discussants. Each of these assignees present their individual comments to the group as a whole, recommend priority scores and then the groups follows with discussion. After that, each reviewer votes his or her individual score for each application. There may be as many as 30 or 40 people around the table. As long as they don't have conflict of interest with the particular application (in which case they'd be out of the room at that time), any reviewer is entitled to comment. That's helpful because the applications get more multi-disciplinary all the time, and you may need the behavior geneticist or brain imager to weigh in on a specific aspect. Investigators will combine areas of science in very creative ways and multiple perspectives are required from the experts sitting around the table.

A: Streamlining of applications means that they're not discussed at the meeting; they are given not a specific score, but the score would have likely fallen between 2.5 and 5 in a 1-5 range with 1 being the best.

We're always urging SRAs to encourage reviewers to use the full range of scores, meaning half the scores should be up to three and half the scores should be streamlined without what we call score compression in any area. We prefer an even distribution of scores, although it's difficult to accomplish. Reviewers might not be quite sure they like the application; they're not totally overwhelmingly positive about it, so they give a score maybe 1.8 to 2. What they're doing is putting the score somewhere around what they perceive to be the payline. We call that score compression; you get these little bumps at certain points in the distribution. The impact of review is minimized if there are too many similar scores.

The important things to know about streamlining are that it does not indicate that the application had no merit. It just indicates that it was in the lower half of the merit range for the group of applications under consideration. And streamlined applications may be revised and resubmitted like any other.

A: When a revised application comes in, the default is to send it back to the same group. If for some reason the investigator thinks that wasn't a great assignment, they can request another review venue. They can't request that the investigator-initiated R01 be reviewed over at NICHD, but they can request another IRG or study section within CSR. If that's a reasonable request and a reasonable fit, we'll allow that.

Any investigator is entitled on any submission to ask for a particular review group. If you've made a mistake or there's a member of the review panel on the application and we can't assign it, we're obliged to get back to the investigator and explain why it didn't go there. Although we're willing to take suggestions, specifying a review committee is not a requirement. Nobody has to think they have to learn all the referral guidelines, but if they want to suggest a particular review venue, they're entitled to do that. Suggesting particular reviewers is not recommended and may even put some reviewers in conflict. It is far better to specify areas of science that need coverage should you feel that this is necessary.

A: We have a lot of information on our website on rosters. You can look up not only the membership roster for a chartered committee, you can also look up the past three meeting rosters which will have all the reviewers who were on the panel. The roster for ny review meetings becomes available 30 days before the meeting. You can also look up rosters for regularly occurring special emphasis panels such as small business innovation panels or fellowship review groups. It is a good idea to examine rosters to see if you want to suggest a review committee in a cover letter.

Although you can find out who is on a review committee, the identity of the reviewers assigned to a particular application is kept strictly confidential. If an application goes back to the same group in revised form, it is likely (but not guaranteed) that some of the same reviewers will be assigned to review it. This is subject to reviewer availability among other considerations.