Peer Reviewing as a Tool for Postdocs Development
Peer reviewing is an essential part of awarding grants and fellowships. It can also play a crucial role in the academic and professional development of early career researchers by enabling valuable insights into the proposal review process, providing mentoring from senior academics, enhancing grant writing skills, and boosting the chances of securing future grants.
For the C-DICE fellowship call, we recruited a group of postdoctoral researchers and final-year PhD students working in net-zero, infrastructure, cities, or energy to join the review panel and participate in the peer review process. They were also asked to reflect on how this experience might benefit them individually and contribute to the postdoctoral community.
The postdoc peer reviewers received bespoke training and were asked to review applications primarily for C-DICE Postdoctoral Research Fellowships but also other C-DICE activities. After this. they reviewed the applications and participated in the review meeting and contributed to the final decisions on who to select for the awards.
This blog looks at the postdocs’ views on being part of this established process. Their reflections covered two main areas: insights from the peer review process that can help with writing grant proposals, and the benefits that peer reviewers get from being involved in the process.
Similar themes emerged repeatedly, highlighting that peer reviewing provided:
- A great learning experience
- Insight into the funding process, potentially shaping their own future grant proposals
- Enlightenment through participating in the shortlisting and final decision process
- Insight into the types of applications that get funded
- Mentorship from senior academics
- Improved grant writing style to increase chances of being shortlisted
- An appreciation for research proposals from diverse backgrounds
- A realisation that initial (first stage or sift) reviewers may not be from their area of expertise, emphasising the importance of writing proposals for a lay audience
- Insight into the grading scheme, showing that being mindful and directly addressing the topic of the call is an easy way to pass the initial sift
Most peer reviewers found the experience valuable, though some felt disillusioned by the decisions that led to the final choices, and some believed too much weight was given to interview scores over the application scores and that not enough value was placed on the letters of support. Postdocs were able to identify that the peer review system is by no means perfect!
Some comments from the Peer Reviewer reflective pieces
“Funders fund ECR fellowships because they want to support researchers to transition to become independent, leading academics to solve the world’s most pressing problems – try and develop your proposal to communicate this passion for addressing what you see as important and impactful questions for society.”
“The process really emphasised the importance of making my own future applications as accessible as possible to someone who is not directly involved with the field. Strategies for achieving this will be to lead with the impact, ensure that citations are used to both clarify points made and provide a starting point for reviewers that want to read further around the subject, and to explicitly map the impact of my work to the assessment criteria.”
“I had the opportunity to hear from more experienced panel members about what they were looking for in a strong fellowship application and the kinds of things that raised red flags for them. I was able to understand how my own Fellowship application might be evaluated in the future.”
“The skills gained from this experience will allow me to feel confident acting as a peer reviewer for larger projects going forward in my career … I hope to feed this opportunity into strengthening my own future collaborative research applications, using this unique and useful perspective to inform my grant writing and submissions.
C-DICE welcomed postdocs to its peer reviewing panels for several funding calls. The learning and development opportunities were clearly articulated in their reflection on the activity. Their insights during the panel review also supported and challenged the more senior academics on the panel. Ultimately, it was a win-win for C-DICE in developing people by being part of the process, and making postdocs better equipped to apply for funding. C-DICE strongly advocates that other organisations should consider more diversity in their peer review panels by including those people they are recruiting and would be happy to discuss this further or share our processes and training. Contact cdice-enquiries@mailbox.lboro.ac.uk to find out more.
By Amy Beierholm, Sharon Henson, Anna Leather