Automation of grant reviewer selection processes

Raine Medical Research Foundation - In August 1957, Mary Raine signed a Deed of Trust bequeathing her property portfolio to the University of Western Australia for the purpose of funding medical research. The Raine Medical Research Foundation represents the largest bequest received by the University for medical research, with a total funding distribution of close to $50mill thus far to medical research in Western Australia. The Foundation has a strong reputation with researchers and partners for supporting research excellence, and for upholding robust and equitable grant review processes, including international peer review. To view our website, please visit: http://rainefoundation.org.au/.

Automation of peer reviewer selection - Many of our funding programs aim to facilitate the research and careers of early-career researchers so that they are competitive for national and international funding. As part of our application review processes, we contact hundreds of top national and international researchers who are experts in their field, in order to secure up to three independent reviews per funding application. This process is extremely time consuming to do manually. To select reviewers, we use a number of different databases that are either free or UWA have licences to. These include the Web of Science, Scopus and Google Scholar. We specifically search for researchers who have high citation numbers in the specified field of research. However, there is currently no way of batching information requests using these online databases. We would like to automate this process by entering lists of up to three key words (as provided in the online application form) or author names relevant to the medical research field. Key outputs would include the potential reviewers name, institution, total citations, website address and contact details.

Automation of conflict of interest checking - Once we identify someone that we think might be suitable as a reviewer, we check their credentials as best we can via their website and check for conflicts of interest with the applicant and associate investigators/mentors listed in the online grant application. This step is extremely important to ensure that the review process is as unbiased and equitable as possible for all applicants. We currently check for conflicts of interest using Medline by manually entering all listed investigator and reviewer names and checking if they have any joint publications among them. We can also do this via Web of Science however, the results are not as thorough. With so many potential reviewers to cross-check, it takes weeks to cross-check everyone over a three-month timeframe. We would like to have this process automated so that we can enter the investigator names listed in the grant application and cross-check each interaction with potential reviewers in a single automated step. This would dramatically improve the effectiveness and efficiency of this process.

Client


Contact: Amanda Cleaver
Phone: 9386 9880
Email: [email protected]
Preferred contact: Email
Location: Suite 24, Hollywood Specialist Centre, 95 Monash Avenue, Nedlands 6009

IP Exploitation Model


The IP exploitation model requested by the Client is: Creative Commons (open source) http://creativecommons.org.au/


Department of Computer Science & Software Engineering
The University of Western Australia
Last modified: 17 July 2020
Modified By: Michael Wise 		UWA