Source of this article: Peng Silong Science Network Blog.
China Nature is about to enter the review stage, and I will share an article written by an expert on the rules of China Nature Review for reference by friends who are not familiar with the rules.
The following is what the expert said:
This year I participated in the evaluation of excellent youth, surface, youth and regional projects. The Excellent Youth Fund is an expert group, and the latter three items share an expert group. The following is some basic information about the evaluation. If there are any omissions, please correct me.
Review process
The evaluation will be carried out in the order of youth, general, and regional projects, and each category will assign each expert to be responsible for a field according to the field, called the chief reviewer .
The chief reviewer gets the project application and online review opinions, and first reads and thinks about the application and online review opinions. This work is done outside of meetings.
Therefore, the evaluation of the foundation is a labor-intensive task. I have to work overtime every night to read the notebooks and write down the opinions of each notebook. I work overtime until 10-11pm every day, and I have received more than 30 applications in total.
During the day, each chief reviewer queues up all the projects for the chief review, gives the projects a sequence, and decides which projects can be funded, which projects cannot be funded , and which ones are alternative projects according to their allocated quota.
In these situations, the review book will be taken down
Judging from this review process, it seems that the chief reviewer has great power, but judging from the situation of participating review, the chief reviewer has the same power and responsibility.
Because according to the results of the online review, the project opinions already have a natural order, and the main review experts generally do not easily change the order of online reviews. If the order is adjusted, a very detailed explanation is required , and other experts must be persuaded to approve this adjustment.
Each participating expert needs to record the recommendations of other reviewers as a reference for the final vote. According to the overall online review results, the online review results have good indicator significance;
Basically, applications with good online evaluation results are generally better in quality than applications with poor online evaluations , and applications with lower rankings in Category B have a lower hit rate.
There is not a great chance that the review can change the order, unless the application at the top of the list has the following situations and is taken down:
1. Some innovations are repeated, especially some opinions clearly point out the documents that may be duplicated with the innovations of the application, this book will not be passed in the review;
2. If the applicant publishes a paper in some dubious journals , and is pointed out by online reviews, it will basically not pass.
Some journals do not review manuscripts strictly, or even do not have decent reviewers. Such applications may be questioned by experts. Because there is no time to read the content of the applicant's thesis, the applicant can only be doubted by the lack of serious doubts about the journal. Individual Category A projects are not funded for similar reasons.
Here I suggest that friends try to choose journals with consensus when submitting manuscripts, and don't be opportunistic, and publish in some magazines that seem easy but are actually poisonous.
3. Some innovation points are pointed out to be unfeasible , and a clear opinion is given, and it will not be passed.
We can see some very professional and specific opinions, and some clearly point out that the technical route is not feasible. As long as there are such strong negative opinions, the project may not be funded even if it has a high score.
4. The controversy is relatively large. The negative opinions given by most online reviews are very specific and detailed, and generally will not be passed.
Although some online reviews are funded and qualified to attend the meeting, if there are many detailed and specific negative opinions in the funded opinions, and most of the negative opinions of the online reviews are concentrated and specific, such projects may not be funded.
5. Part of the content is missing , such as technical route, feasibility analysis, etc. The missing situation is serious.
Many fund applicants have a good foundation and the topic is relatively popular, but the application letter is not rigorous enough and lacks the necessary parts, especially in most cases, the technical route is not detailed, and the feasibility demonstration is not solid. It can be regarded as a flaw in the application form. If this happens, the probability of not getting funding is high.
Items in the middle-to-high range are easy, and the remaining ends are unlikely
The Youth and Surface Fund is the prestige project of the Foundation Committee, and fairness is basically guaranteed from the process, form to result. Some friends who applied think that it is darker inside, which is wishful thinking and self-suggestion.
If the fund is not funded, there is always a serious shortfall in some way. Of course, there are also some relatively innovative projects that are not funded, which is a normal phenomenon.
The projects funded by the NSFC are neither the worst nor the most likely to win the Nobel Prize, because it is generally not easy to obtain consensus support for ideas that are too unique.
A poor project cannot be hidden from the eyes of 4-5 experts. Speaking academically, the project review process of the Fund Committee is a band-pass filter. Items in the mid-to-high range are easy to hit, and less likely on either end.
In general, I personally think that there is no doubt about the transparency of the Natural Science Foundation of China and the fairness of the review process, which is unique among all national plans, and this point has also been agreed by the academic community.
The biggest reason for whether to get funding is the applicant himself, whether it is his own strength or the quality of application writing, these are the essential reasons for whether he can get funding. Other factors can be discussed as self-consolation, but they are useless. Instead of complaining about the quality of online review experts, it is more effective to think about how to improve your application and scientific research.