A Group Decision Support Approach to Evaluate Experts for R&D Project Selection

In R&D project selection, experts (or external reviewers) always play a very important role because their opinions will have great influence on the outcome of the project selection. It is also undoubted that experts with high-expertise level will make useful and professional judgments on the projects to be selected. So, how to measure the expertise level of experts and select the most appropriate experts for project selection is a very significant issue. This paper presents a group decision support approach to evaluate experts for R&D project selection. Where the criteria and their attributes for evaluating experts are summarized mainly based on the experience with the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC). A formal procedure that integrates both objective and subjective information on experts is also presented. It is mainly based on analytic hierarchy process (AHP), scoring method, and fuzzy linguistic processing. A group decision support system is designed and implemented for illustration of the proposed method.