Funding decisions, peer review, and scientific excellence in physical sciences, chemistry, and geosciences

This article presents an analysis of the funding policies of three research councils at the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO). The key issue is the extent to which these three councils recognized scientific excellence, and particularly, whether they succeeded in rewarding the grants of the most successful and influential researchers. Data on grant applications provided by NWO for the time period 2000–4 were combined with...