The primary goal of the peer review of research grant proposals is to evaluate their quality for the funding agency. An important secondary goal is to provide constructive feedback to applicants for their resubmissions. However, little is known about whether review feedback achieves this goal. In this paper, we present a mixed methods analysis of responses from grant applicants regarding their perceptions of the effectiveness and appropriateness of peer review feedback they received from grant submissions. Overall, 56%-60% of applicants determined the feedback to be appropriate (fair, well-written, and well-informed), although their judgments were more favorable if their recent application was funded. Importantly, independent of funding success, women found the feedback better written than men, and more white applicants found the feedback to be fair than non-white applicants. Also, perceptions of a variety of biases were specifically reported in respondents feedback. Less than 40% of applicants found the feedback to be very useful in informing their research and improving grantsmanship and future submissions. Further, negative perceptions of the appropriateness of review feedback were positively correlated with more negative perceptions of feedback usefulness. Importantly, respondents suggested that highly competitive funding pay-lines and poor inter-panel reliability limited the usefulness of review feedback. Overall, these results suggest that more effort is needed to ensure that appropriate and useful feedback is provided to all applicants, bolstering the equity of the review process and likely improving the quality of resubmitted proposals.

中文翻译：

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拨款审查反馈：适当性和实用性

对研究资助计划进行同行评审的主要目标是评估资助机构的质量。一个重要的次要目标是为申请人的重新提交提供建设性的反馈。但是，对于评论反馈是否达到这一目标知之甚少。在本文中，我们针对资助者对他们从资助提交中收到的同行评审反馈的有效性和适当性的看法，对资助者的回答进行了混合方法分析。总体而言，有56％-60％的申请人认为反馈意见是适当的（公正，写得很好且见多识广），尽管如果他们的近期申请获得资助，他们的判断会更有利。重要的是，与筹款成功无关，女性发现反馈的书面形式要好于男性，越来越多的白人申请人发现反馈比非白人申请人更公平。此外，在受访者的反馈意见中特别报告了对各种偏见的看法。不到40％的申请人认为反馈对于告知他们的研究，改善资助水平和将来的申请非常有用。此外，对评论反馈的适当性的负面看法与对反馈有用性的更多负面看法正相关。重要的是，受访者认为，竞争激烈的资金支付线和面板间的可靠性差，限制了评论反馈的有效性。总体而言，这些结果表明，需要做出更多的努力来确保向所有申请人提供适当和有用的反馈，