Does Peer Review Penalize Scientific Risk Taking? Evidence from NIH Grant Renewals

Science funders loudly profess their appetite for “high-risk, high-reward” research. Practicing scientists insist, just as loudly, that peer review punishes it. We study the determinants of renewal for more than 100,000 cycles of R01 grants from the National Institutes of Health between 1980 and 2015. We define scientific risk taking as an ex ante choice—the commitment of effort to a project whose distribution of outcomes is wider, less well understood, or less well charted than the alternatives the investigator could have pursued—and we construct four distinct measures of chosen ambition: extreme tail outcomes, disruptiveness, pivoting from an investigator’s prior work, and standing out from the crowd in one’s field. After controlling comprehensively for investigator, institution, and grant characteristics, we find that riskier grants are renewed at markedly lower rates across all four measures. The penalty is sharper for new investigators, and it tends to be sharper for more novel research.