IGE: Track 1: Empowering Tomorrow's Scholars: A Comprehensive Training Initiative for Graduate Students in Scientific Peer Review

This National Science Foundation Innovations in Graduate Education (IGE) award facilitates the development and implementation of a comprehensive graduate curriculum designed to enhance scientific literacy, peer review skills, and communication capabilities among STEM graduate students. Recognizing these skills' critical role in advancing scientific knowledge and career progress, this program seeks to equip graduate students with the tools necessary to critically evaluate scientific literature and contribute meaningfully to the peer review process.

This innovative curriculum will foster a community of skilled reviewers and effective communicators, accelerating the dissemination of accurate scientific knowledge and improving the quality of scientific research.

The program will immerse graduate students in peer review and publishing processes through hands-on experiences. This includes navigating preprint platforms, evaluating cutting-edge scientific literature with high impact, and participating in peer review processes with the editorial board of a preprint overlay journal. The program aims to equip graduate students to rapidly evaluate preprint articles, providing scientific credibility to unreviewed articles that are of wide interest.

The pilot program will consist of two cohorts of graduate students to initially develop a curriculum based on broadly applicable open-access online educational materials, including audio and video recordings, written content, and interactive workshops. This curriculum will be evaluated for its effectiveness in enhancing graduate student outcomes such as scientific literacy, comprehension, confidence in peer review processes, and community involvement.

The educational model and online training materials will also be assessed for accessibility and scalability to expand and disseminate the peer review training program and materials. By facilitating broad public access to scientific materials, this program represents a strategic investment in the quality and availability of the results of U.S. scientific research.

The Innovations in Graduate Education (IGE) program is focused on research in graduate education. The goals of IGE are to pilot, test and validate innovative approaches to graduate education and to generate the knowledge required to move these approaches into the broader community.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.