Reviewer Guidelines: Graduate Student Research Awards

The GSRA is SSB's largest award competition. Each year we receive around 100 applications. Thus, we work to assemble a large reviewer pool to ensure that each proposal is evaluated by multiple qualified external reviewers. Reviewers are all sent a form to identify proposals (based on titles and applicant names) that they cannot review because of conflicts-of-interest. We suggest that reviewers use their best judgement when identifying conflicts-of-interest. 

Reviewers are sent the proposals and asked to complete an online-evaluation form for each of the applications they are given to review. They are asked to give constructive feedback that will be sent to the applicants and hopefully help them improve their work and/or application for future funding opportunities. The questions are:

1. Do the proposed activities have the potential to lead to successful data collection/analysis and support the initialization or completion of the applicant’s graduate research in systematics?
   
2. Please provide any additional comments about the merits of the proposal or other constructive feedback for the applicant.
3. Please rate this proposal on the following scale: fair, good, very good, or excellent.

In their evaluation, reviewers are also given an opportunity to provide additional confidential comments that are only read by the SSB Awards Committee. After all proposal reviews have been submitted, the Awards Committee reads each one to ensure that all proposals have been appropriately reviewed. Then, the award recipients are selected from the proposals with the overall highest reviewer ratings. Starting 2021, we have adopted a rubric to help the evaluation process.

CONFIDENTIALITY: As in any review process, we ask reviewers to not share any information with anyone about the proposals they are evaluating, and to keep the review process as confidential as possible.

Contact

If you have any questions or comments for the Awards Committee about this process, please email the SSB Awards Director (​awards@systematicbiologists.org).