NHMRC to Webcast Grant Review Panel Briefing. (August 11, 2013)

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This coming Monday (August 12, 2013) the CEO of the National Health and Research Council (NHMRC), Warwick Anderson, will host an hour long webcast of the  briefing for the Grant Review Panel (GRP) members :

Questions for NHMRC regarding the content of this presentation should be directed to projects@nhmrc.gov.au.

• View the webcast (available from 9:00am AEST Monday 12 August)
   

• Test your technology before the event here

A feature of this year's application assessments is the: Removal of Journal Impact Factors from the peer review of individual research grant and fellowship applications.

The statement from the NHMRC reads:

On the advice of Research Committee, NHMRC will no longer request Journal Impact Factors (JIF) as part of any applications for funding nor use these in peer review of individual applications.
 

Journal Impact Factor is not a sound basis upon which to judge the impact of individual papers.
 

The JIF of any journal does not describe the impact, importance or quality of any individual paper. Instead, it describes the average citations for all papers in that journal over a two year period and thus is not a description of the impact of each paper.
 

Citations of individual papers in any journal range from zero to many hundreds, even thousands for a landmark or methodological paper. Regardless of the JIF of the journal, whether high or low, the range and variance of citations to individual papers is very large.
 

It is therefore not logically sound to equate the “impact” of the journal, with the “impact” of each paper in that journal.

Announced Key Changes Implemented in 2013:

• A significant focus has been on reducing the workload for Grant Review Panel (GRP) members. This has been achieved by:

  • limiting the number of applications per panel to 100, where possible,

  • revising the role of Primary and Secondary spokespersons,

  • earlier removal of applications Not For Further Consideration (NFFC).

• Further changes in line with our 2013-2015 Strategic Plan and recommendations made through our Research Committee (RC) are planned to streamline this process.

Below are the the URLs for two documents released last month by the NHMRC:

http://www.nhmrc.gov.au/media/newsletters/ceo/2013/ceo-newsletter-july-2013

https://www.nhmrc.gov.au/_files_nhmrc/file/grants/peer/impact%20factors%20in%20peer%20review.pdf