Does a scientist who has had three patents in the past five years, but only three papers, each cited just three times, deserve more recognition than one with five Nature papers and 1,000 citations? Does a scientist who works in a hot field and has made nice contributions deserve more credit than another working in a less glamorous, lonelier field, who has made equally profound contributions? These questions — which were often difficult to answer — were uppermost in the mind of Nature Medicine_’s editor Juan Carlos Lopez when he recently served as one of the judges for a young scientist award, as he describes at Spoonful of medicineout.html.
Lopez reflects that if he and his fellow judges made a mistake in their decision, the consequences would not be all that serious for the scientist who should have won. But similar questions are also considered by grant reviewers. In such cases, wrong decisions “can lead to a lab’s shutdown, to fired postdocs and to truncated careers, which, alas, are becoming more and more common”.

Nature 453, x; 5 June 2008