HRB 2025 - Bibliometric Tool 2025-2029

Summary

The Health Research Board (hereinafter referred to as the “HRB”) is a statutory agency under the aegis of the Department of Health. The HRB’s mission is to support research that improves people's health, promotes evidence-informed care, and creates solutions to societal challenges. Our vison is ‘better health through excellent research, data and evidence.’ An overview of the HRB’s objectives and activities may be found in The HRB Strategy 2021-2025, Health research - making an impact, (https://www.hrb.ie/strategy-2025/). Peer review is at the heart of HRB funding decisions and underpins every decision in our external funding portfolio of approximately €55m p.a. As an organisation driven by research evidence, the HRB requires means to access the most recent publications across all health-relevant areas for a variety of reasons. It has had access to a bibliometric tool since 2020. This has been used extensively for three processes across the organisation: (1) Peer reviewer identification in the funding function, (2) systematic searches for evidence in the Evidence Centre to provide evidence synthesis products to the DOH, and (3) evaluation of our funding portfolio. With very few exceptions we use a two-step approach where we first identify, contact, invite, follow up with, acknowledge and validate reviews from international experts in the area. The expert peer reviewers are specifically matched to individual applications we receive. Secondly, we invite a panel of experts in the broad area of focus or emphasis of the scheme. These panel members compare applications against each other on the basis of our assessment criteria and make a final funding recommendation for the Board. Identifying relevant reviewers that are closely matched with an application (and where there are no conflicts of interest) is a time- and labour-intensive task. Our experience is that many potential peer reviewers don’t respond, some respond but don’t accept the invitation, and others accept but don’t submit the review at all or within our deadline. The HRB is now seeking to obtain a licence for a bibliometric tool.