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v2026.1714 entries · CC-BY 4.0
Dictionary termTrack EStablev2026.2

Peer review (in assessment)

The use of expert qualitative judgement by relevant peers to evaluate research outputs, researchers, proposals or environments, distinct from peer review of journal manuscripts.

ByCASRAI Editorial Board
· Last updated 21 May 2026

Examples

Worked examples

  • Is an instance

    A funder publishes panel terms of reference, scoring rubric, and reviewer demographic statistics.

  • Is an instance

    An institution trains promotion-committee reviewers in responsible assessment and unconscious-bias awareness.

Counter-examples

Looks similar, but isn't

  • Not an instance

    Convening a panel without disclosed conflict-of-interest checks.

  • Not an instance

    Asking reviewers to score by impact factor without qualitative judgement.

Editorial commentary

Peer review in assessment encompasses panel review of grant proposals, expert review of REF outputs, promotion-committee judgement of researcher dossiers, and external review for hiring. It differs from manuscript peer review by being decision-oriented (selection, ranking, funding) rather than improvement-oriented, but shares concerns about reviewer expertise, conflicts of interest, calibration across panels, and bias (gender, geography, language, institution). Responsible-assessment frameworks promote explicit panel-criteria publication, reviewer training, diversity of panellists, and structured rubrics to mitigate these risks.

References

  • Bornmann L 'Scientific peer review' Annual Review of Information Science and Technology, 2011. Research on Research Institute (RoRI) reports on peer-review practice.

Also known as

Expert review (assessment) · Panel review

Machine-readable encodings

Use in your systems

JATS XML <role> element
xml
<role vocab="credit"
      vocab-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/"
      vocab-term="Peer review (in assessment)"
      vocab-term-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/peer-review-in-assessment" />
Schema.org DefinedTerm (JSON-LD)
json
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  "@type": "DefinedTerm",
  "name": "Peer review (in assessment)",
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  "inDefinedTermSet": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/domain/responsible-research-assessment/",
  "url": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/peer-review-in-assessment",
  "sameAs": [
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  ],
  "license": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"
}

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