Desk Rejection Shadow Experiment: pre-experiment survey

Overview

UKRI has chosen to take part in a desk rejection shadow experiment partnership with the Research on Research Institute (RORI) at UCL. 

Desk rejection refers to the practice whereby staff at a funding agency screen applications early in the process and remove those that are unlikely to succeed, without sending them out for external peer review.

Why your views matter

For this experiment, we are only asking staff delivering funding opportunities to score, rather than reject, applications.

This will allow us to compare staff scores with those provided by external reviewers in order to find out whether staff can identify applications that are unlikely to be considered fundable through traditional expert review. 

As such, this is a ‘shadow experiment’ because we are only collecting data—the scores given by staff will not be used for actual funding decisions. You can read more about the experiment here. Please ask our project co-ordinator Lauren Curtis (Lauren.Curtis@esrc.ukri.org) if you have any further questions.