01415nas a2200229   4500000000100000008004100001260001500042653001100057653003300068653001600101653001100117653002100128100001800149700001800167700002200185245008200207856004000289300001100329490000600340520082500346022001401171       2016                            d  c2016-02-1610agrants10anational institute of health10apeer review10apolicy10aResearch funding1 aFerric C Fang1 aAnthony Bowen1 aArturo Casadevall00aNIH peer review percentile scores are poorly predictive of grant productivity  uhttps://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.13323  ae133230 v53 aPeer review is widely used to assess grant applications so that the highest ranked applications can be funded. A number of studies have questioned the ability of peer review panels to predict the productivity of applications, but a recent analysis of grants funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in the US found that the percentile scores awarded by peer review panels correlated with productivity as measured by citations of grant-supported publications. Here, based on a re-analysis of these data for the 102,740 funded grants with percentile scores of 20 or better, we report that these percentile scores are a poor discriminator of productivity. This underscores the limitations of peer review as a means of assessing grant applications in an era when typical success rates are often as low as about 10%.  a2050-084X