A decision support approach for assigning reviewers to proposals

Peer review plays an important role in research project selection at funding agencies. Quality of peer review greatly depends on the degree of matching between reviewers and assigned research proposals. This kind of matching is largely determined by the process of assigning proposals to reviewers. As the number of proposals submitted to funding agencies continues to grow, the traditional approaches of finding appropriate reviewers for each individual proposal fail to satisfy the practical needs. This paper proposes an alternative approach whose basic idea is grouping proposals first and then assigning appropriate reviewers for each proposal group. Based on the idea, a decision support approach is proposed to identify valid proposals and reviewers, classify proposals and reviewers according to their disciplines, partition proposals into groups and assign reviewers to proposal groups. A system has been developed based on the proposed approach to facilitate the decision making process of assigning proposals to reviewers. © 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.