Our Mission
In today’s complex regulatory landscape and activist oriented attacks on science, SciPinion was established to build trust and maintain credibility through our Certified Peer Reviews, which are engineered for objectivity. Our goal is to introduce clarity and certainty from the expert community to the world’s toughest science problems, instilling universal trust in science.
Ethics
SciPinion welcomes questions, conversation and civil discourse around our ethical standards, methodologies and science. We work with any entity that requires an objective scientific opinion and accepts our required transparency standards including government agencies, industry and academia. This can lead some, who are not familiar with our unique process, to assume that there is sponsor bias in our panel’s findings. This certainly can be an issue in the science consulting industry so this assumption is understandable. However, this is exactly what our process is designed to mitigate and we invite any conversation or questions, accountability and transparency are core to our mission.
SciPinion Certified Peer Reviews
In building trust, our peer review process is central to our approach. We have developed a formal method for identifying, recruiting, selecting, and engaging panels of experts to minimize bias. Our suite of applications facilitates the collection of opinions and debate among panels of experts in a manner that eliminates potential sources of negative heuristics.
SciPinions Certified Peer Review panels follow a specific process designed to minimize potential bias. Our approach of asking detailed questions with quantitative response options supports quantitative measures of opinions and statistical measures of outliers and consensus among panels of experts. This integrated approach has been shown to yield reproducible results.
Detailed Visualization of Our Process
Engineering Objectivity
SciPinion panels are engineered for objectivity through a triple-blinded approach. The experts participating in the panel are blinded to the sponsors (an expert’s opinion should not be influenced by who the sponsor is), sponsors are blinded to the panel participants (we don’t allow clients to cherry pick their panels), and the panelists are all blinded to each other. All SciPinion panels are conducted in this method to prevent the well-known sources of negative heuristics that can impede the outcome of deliberations:
- Groupthink
- Deference to the perceived expert
- Amplification
- Overbearing panel members
Many regulatory agencies claim to design unbiased expert panels, but at SciPinion, we recognize that everyone has inherent biases, some of which may be unknown. For instance, we have found that certain factors, such as the year an expert obtained their advanced degree, can influence how they interpret evidence from cutting-edge technologies. Some agencies attempt to “balance” panels by including diverse opinions, but this approach has flaws. It assumes that those selecting the panel can predict experts’ views, which introduces its own form of bias. Moreover, while this method may yield a mix of opinions, it fails to accurately represent the distribution of views in the broader expert community. For instance, if the true expert consensus on an issue is 95% to 5%, a panel artificially balanced to a 50/50 split would produce findings that are fundamentally unrepresentative of the field’s actual stance.
Trust
SciPinion has pioneered a unique peer review process that relies on engineered objectivity and scientific opinion certification. Because of this, SciPinion is trusted by government agencies such as Health Canada, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the US EPA for our rigorous and transparent certification process. Our partnerships demonstrate the confidence that public agencies have in SciPinion’s ability to provide reliable and credible scientific evaluations.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) acknowledges that SciPinion’s peer review process meets or exceeds the EPA’s FIFRA Science Advisory Panel (SAP) process in every point of comparison as shown below.
Table 1. Comparison of the review processes between the SciPinion panel and a FIFRA SAP – (EPA Report No. 22-E-0053)
| SciPinion | FIFRA SAP | |
| Time frame | ~4 to 5 months | ~ 9 months |
| Standard operating procedures: | Methods for recruiting, verifying, assembling, and managing expert panels follow internal SOP (published in Kirman 2019) | Methods follow agency SOP |
| Number of panel members: | 14 finalists for review (four former EPA) | 7 tier-1 committee members + 10-12 ad hoc reviewers |
| Potential panel members considered: | 1,491 individual applicants | Public call for nominations, usually resulting in 20-30, sometimes 70-100 |
| Candidate selection criteria: | Have expertise, objective, available and willing to participate | Have expertise, objective, available and willing to participate |
| Panel selection criteria: | Conflict of interest, expertise verification, engagement analysis | Conflict of interest, expertise, verification, balance of the committee |
| Panel selection analysis: | Quantitative | Qualitative; semi quantitative to meet FACA balance requirements |
| Restrictions: | US and international experts | US citizens, occasionally non-US citizens who waive salary or satisfy certain requirements toward seeking citizenship |
| Sources for identifying panel members: | Internal database, authors of recent publications on the topic, profiles on social media, general internet searches, referrals | Nominations, internal database, referrals |
| Meeting format: | Virtual and private | Hybrid and public |
| Review process: | Individuals review materials and answer charge questions; The panel participates in comment and debate; Finalize responses to charge questions | Individuals review materials and answer charge questions; The panel participates in comment and debate; Finalize responses to charge questions |
| Quantitative consensus analysis: | Yes | No, but seek and encourage consensus |
| Public comments: | No | Yes |