From talking with people who do work on a lot of grant committees in the NIH and similar funding orgs, it’s really hard to do proper blinding of reviews. Certain labs tend to focus on particular theories and methods, repeating variations of the same idea… So if you are familiar the general approach of a particular lab and it’s primary investigator, you will immediately recognize and have a knee-jerk reaction (positive or negative) to a paper which pattern-matches to the work that that lab / subfield is doing.
Common reactions from grant reviewers:
Positive—“This fits in nicely with my friend Bob’s work. I respect his work, I should argue for funding this grant.”
Neutral—“This seems entirely novel to me, I don’t recognize it as connecting with any of the leading trendy ideas in the field or any of my personal favorite subtopics. Therefore, this seems high risk and I shouldn’t argue too hard for it.”
Slightly negative—“This seems novel to me, and doesn’t sound particularly ‘jargon-y’ or technically sophisticated. Even if the results would be beneficial to humanity, the methods seem boring and uncreative. I will argue slightly against funding this.”
Negative—“This seems to pattern match to a subfield I feel biased against. Even if this isn’t from one of Jill’s students, it fits with Jill’s take on this subtopic. I don’t want views like Jill’s gaining more traction. I will argue against this regardless of the quality of the logic and preliminary data presented in this grant proposal.”
From talking with people who do work on a lot of grant committees in the NIH and similar funding orgs, it’s really hard to do proper blinding of reviews. Certain labs tend to focus on particular theories and methods, repeating variations of the same idea… So if you are familiar the general approach of a particular lab and it’s primary investigator, you will immediately recognize and have a knee-jerk reaction (positive or negative) to a paper which pattern-matches to the work that that lab / subfield is doing.
Common reactions from grant reviewers:
Positive—“This fits in nicely with my friend Bob’s work. I respect his work, I should argue for funding this grant.”
Neutral—“This seems entirely novel to me, I don’t recognize it as connecting with any of the leading trendy ideas in the field or any of my personal favorite subtopics. Therefore, this seems high risk and I shouldn’t argue too hard for it.”
Slightly negative—“This seems novel to me, and doesn’t sound particularly ‘jargon-y’ or technically sophisticated. Even if the results would be beneficial to humanity, the methods seem boring and uncreative. I will argue slightly against funding this.”
Negative—“This seems to pattern match to a subfield I feel biased against. Even if this isn’t from one of Jill’s students, it fits with Jill’s take on this subtopic. I don’t want views like Jill’s gaining more traction. I will argue against this regardless of the quality of the logic and preliminary data presented in this grant proposal.”