Peer review process

Peer review panel composition

GACD selects peer review panel members according to the following guiding principles:

• Reviewers should have experience and expertise and be active in the area of focus of the funding call. Expertise can be evidenced through career progression, peer reviewed publications, clinical experience or equivalent.

• Reviewers should hold a leadership role in their area of expertise, demonstrated by leadership of research groups, grants and/or peer reviewed publications.

• Experience in peer review, including for peer reviewed journals and other funding organisations.

• Emeritus researchers should be considered eligible, as long as they remain engaged in the field.

GACD aims to achieve the following panel composition:

• Members from the country or geographic area where proposed research will be carried out.

• Members from a range of career stages.

• Balanced representation of genders and ethnicities.

• Where applications with a focus on Indigenous communities are received, a member of the panel who is an Indigenous researcher.

• Members with implementation science expertise.

Peer review process

GACD operates a two-stage joint review process.

Stage 1 applications are first checked for eligibility by the GACD Secretariat and participating funders, based on:

• application completeness;

• compliance with funder-specific eligibility criteria (e.g. eligibility of principal investigators or equivalent roles); and

• alignment with the call objectives (e.g. relevance to implementation research and the call remit).

Applications that are incomplete, ineligible, or not relevant to the call will not proceed to peer review and will be removed from the competition.

Eligible applications are then assessed by members of the independent peer review panel against the GACD evaluation criteria. Reviewers provide scores and written comments to GACD, and each participating funding agency receives the evaluation details along with a ranked list of applications submitted to that agency. Rankings are based on the average reviewer scores and used to develop a shortlist. Shortlisted applicants are invited to submit more detailed Stage 2 applications that also must include a brief response to the Stage 1 peer review comments.

Stage 2 applications are reviewed using the same evaluation criteria and discussed at a Joint Peer Review meeting. Final rankings, based on average reviewer scores, are provided to participating agencies to inform funding decisions, in line with their national requirements.

All eligible applications receive anonymised feedback from the review process.

Application scoring criteria

Applications are evaluated against the following criteria, with each criterion weighted equally:

• relevance and quality of the project to the funding call;

• quality of the team;

• feasibility of the project; and

• expected impact of the project.

Reviewers will be asked to evaluate the applications based on the responsiveness of the application to these criteria. You can download the detailed scoring criteria for more information.

Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA)

The Global Alliance for Chronic Diseases is committed to the principles of the Declaration on Research Assessment. DORA is a worldwide initiative to improve the ways in which researchers and the outputs of scholarly research are evaluated. It was established in 2012 to stop the practice of judging scientific output by its journal impact factor.

The DORA agreement has three main recommendations of good research assessment in funding agencies:

1. Transparency in how funding applications and grants are assessed: When researchers make an application, they should know how their proposed research will be assessed. Similarly, during the course of the grant, the evaluation criteria for scientific productivity should be clear and transparent.

2. Responsible use of bibliometrics: Journal impact factor should not be used as a surrogate measure of the scientific quality of a research article. A research article should be judged by its own scientific merit, not that of the journal that it is published in.

3. An appreciation of the value of all research outputs: The value of all research outputs, not just publications, should be recognised in the assessment of scientific productivity. In the evaluation of past research productivity, the consideration of wider research outputs such as the generation of intellectual property, influence on policy, or public engagement activities, gives a more complete indication of achievement..