A group decision making approach to research proposal evaluation and selection

The purpose of this study was to develop a systematic method of selecting research proposals in a way that would reflect the multiple objectives of an organization represented by a group of decision makers. The method was applied at the USDA Forest Products Laboratory in Madison, Wis. It involved the following steps: 1) definition of the attributes against which proposals would be judged; 2) determination of the relative importance of each attribute; and 3) preparation of scoring instructions to rate each project according to the different attributes. This case study illustrates how a process as inherently subjective as the selection of research proposals can be made more systematic and representative of the values of an organization.

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