Research project evaluation and selection: an evidential reasoning rule-based method for aggregating peer review information with reliabilities

Research project evaluation and selection is mainly concerned with evaluating a number of research projects and then choosing some of them for implementation. It involves a complex multiple-experts multiple-criteria decision making process. Thus this paper presents an effective method for evaluating and selecting research projects by using the recently-developed evidential reasoning (ER) rule. The proposed ER rule based evaluation and selection method mainly includes (1) using belief structures to represent peer review information provided by multiple experts, (2) employing a confusion matrix for generating experts’ reliabilities, (3) implementing utility based information transformation to handle qualitative evaluation criteria with different evaluation grades, and (4) aggregating multiple experts’ evaluation information on multiple criteria using the ER rule. An experimental study on the evaluation and selection of research proposals submitted to the National Science Foundation of China demonstrates the applicability and effectiveness of the proposed method. The results show that (1) the ER rule based method can provide consistent and informative support to make informed decisions, and (2) the reliabilities of the review information provided by different experts should be taken into account in a rational research project evaluation and selection process, as they have a significant influence to the selection of eligible projects for panel review.