A decision support approach for assigning reviewers to proposals

  • Authors:

  • Yunhong Xu;Jian Ma;Yonghong Sun;Gang Hao;Wei Xu;Dingtao Zhao

  • Affiliations:

  • Department of Information Systems, City University of Hong Kong, Kowloon, Hong Kong, PR China and Management School, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, Anhui Province, PR China;Department of Information Systems, City University of Hong Kong, Kowloon, Hong Kong, PR China;Department of Information Systems, City University of Hong Kong, Kowloon, Hong Kong, PR China;Department of Management Sciences, City University of Hong Kong, Kowloon, Hong Kong, PR China;School of Management, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, PR China;Management School, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, Anhui Province, PR China

  • Venue:
  • Expert Systems with Applications: An International Journal
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

Peer review plays an important role in research project selection at funding agencies. Quality of peer review greatly depends on the degree of matching between reviewers and assigned research proposals. This kind of matching is largely determined by the process of assigning proposals to reviewers. As the number of proposals submitted to funding agencies continues to grow, the traditional approaches of finding appropriate reviewers for each individual proposal fail to satisfy the practical needs. This paper proposes an alternative approach whose basic idea is grouping proposals first and then assigning appropriate reviewers for each proposal group. Based on the idea, a decision support approach is proposed to identify valid proposals and reviewers, classify proposals and reviewers according to their disciplines, partition proposals into groups and assign reviewers to proposal groups. A system has been developed based on the proposed approach to facilitate the decision making process of assigning proposals to reviewers.