Library Item
National Science Foundation's Merit Review Criteria: Review and Revisions
Description:
The National Science Board (NSB) has released a report on the National Science Foundation’s merit review criteria. The NSB report, National Science Foundation’s Merit Review Criteria: Review and Revisions, is the culmination of a thorough review by the NSB Task Force on Merit Review to determine if the merit review criteria used by the National Science Foundation (NSF) to evaluate all proposals remain appropriate. NSF reviews two criterion, intellectual merit and broader impacts, for every proposal the agency receives.
The NSB task force was put in place in February 2010, with a charge to examine the two merit review criteria and their effectiveness in achieving the goals for NSF research support of science, engineering and education. Based on the task force’s analyses, the NSB concluded that the two current merit review criteria of intellectual merit and broader impacts remain appropriate for evaluating NSF proposals, though with revisions. The revisions to the criteria are described in the report.
Substantive input from a wide variety of stakeholder groups, internal and external to NSF, helped guide the work of the task force, which resulted in several thousand individuals providing feedback.
NSF’s two-criterion merit review system was instituted in 1997. As part of the system, reviewers and proposers are asked to address or identify elements under these categories:
What is the intellectual merit of the proposed activity?
What are the broader impacts of the proposed activity?
NSF plans to develop a detailed implementation plan that will lead to the inclusion of the revised criteria in the next version of NSF’s Proposal and Award Policies and Procedures Guide and the Proposal & Award Manual.
The National Science Board is the 25-member policymaking body for the National Science Foundation and advisory body to the President and Congress on science and engineering issues. For more information on the National Science Board and its current Members, visit the NSB website.
