Peer Review in Research Assessment

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Peer review in assessment refers to the use of expert qualitative judgement — by grant panels, REF sub-panels, promotion committees, or editorial boards evaluating a track record — as the primary evaluative mechanism in research assessment, as distinct from metric-driven scoring. It is a specific application of the general practice of peer review, applied to evaluating a researcher, output, or unit’s overall contribution rather than to a single manuscript’s suitability for publication.

Why this is distinct from editorial peer review

Editorial (pre-publication) peer review asks whether a specific manuscript should be published, in what form, and after what revisions. Peer review in assessment asks a different question: given a body of work, a case study, or a track record, how strong is its contribution relative to a funding, tenure, or evaluation panel’s criteria? The same reviewer skill set applies, but the object of judgement, the criteria, and the decision being informed all differ.

Its role in responsible-assessment reform

Peer review sits at the centre of the shift away from metric-only evaluation. DORA’s recommendations and the CoARA Agreement’s ten commitments both push institutions toward assessing research “on its own merits rather than on the basis of the journal in which it is published”, which in practice means giving expert peer judgement more weight relative to journal-level or citation-based proxies, not replacing metrics with peer review wholesale. See quantitative-qualitative balance for how the two are meant to combine, and process diversity in assessment for the wider set of evaluative methods peer review sits alongside.

Known limitations

Peer review in assessment is not free of its own problems: reviewer bias, inconsistent inter-rater reliability, disciplinary and institutional-prestige bias, and reviewer workload and capacity constraints are all well documented in the peer-review literature and apply here as much as they do to editorial peer review.

References

DORA, sfdora.org. CoARA Agreement on Reforming Research Assessment, coara.org.

Use in your systems

JATS XML <role> element

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Schema.org DefinedTerm (JSON-LD)

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Peer review (in assessment)