About the APS Application Review Process

The American Physiological Society (APS) strives to provide a fair, effective and efficient honors and awards selection process for all our applicants and nominees. Our guidelines aim to protect confidentiality, remove bias or conflicts of interest, ensure rigor in the review of scientific excellence and promote transparency about how the awards are selected.

Each APS award has a scoring committee composed of members who are responsible for the review, scoring and selection of the recipient(s). Each scoring committee:

• reviews and confirms award eligibility,
• reviews and confirms that application materials were submitted per the guidelines,
• uses scoring rubrics based on the application criteria,
• scores and ranks the applicants to determine the award recipient(s), and/or
• discusses all applications and application scores to select the recipient(s).

Conflicts of Interest (COI) 

American Physiological Society (APS) honors and awards, by their nature, require judging that is somewhat subjective. Therefore, it is particularly important that there be neither actual bias nor the appearance of bias in the selection process. If a member of the scoring committee or ad hoc reviewer has close ties with an applicant or applicant’s research advisor and subsequently participates in the award rating process for that applicant, this can create the appearance of bias (whether there is actual bias involved or not). Therefore, APS has a policy that outlines the procedures guiding the participation of members of the committee and ad hoc reviewers in the review and scoring of the applications. 

Each COI policy is slightly different, based on the award criteria. Reviewers receive a copy of this policy at the onset of the review process. It is incumbent on the committee member or ad hoc reviewer to inform the committee chair and APS staff as soon as the reviewer is aware of the conflict, including information on the level of collaboration between the reviewer and applicant. This will allow the chair to ensure that the reviewer is not assigned to review any applications for which they have a potential conflict of interest. APS also has built in recusal feature in the online review system to facilitate this communication. 

On a Scoring Committee?

Log into the Reviewer Dashboard to access your assigned applications.