Research grant agencies are turning to lotteries to distribute funding among closely matched scientific proposals, according to a report by Nature.
The Swiss National Science Foundation introduced a mathematical model in 2022 that sends proposals near the funding line into a randomized draw. Rachel Heyard, then a biostatistician at the foundation and now a researcher at the University of Zurich’s Center for Reproducible Science and Research Synthesis, helped build the framework to address uncertainty in peer review scoring. In 2021, the agency disbursed roughly $1 billion in annual funding across scientific disciplines. Reviewers scored applications from A to D, but proposals clustered in the middle could not be reliably ranked by panels.
Varied lottery systems
The Research on Research Institute in London has logged more than a dozen funding bodies testing partial lotteries, including 11 catalogue entries since 2022. Participating institutions include Wellcome in London, the Novo Nordisk Foundation in Denmark, and several universities, with individual grant sizes ranging from a few thousand dollars to more than $1 million.
Agencies take different approaches to randomization. While the Swiss National Science Foundation uses a tie-breaker model only when reviewers cannot separate borderline proposals, New Zealand’s Health Research Council has randomized all proposals that clear a quality threshold for its NZ$150,000 ($87,000) Explorer Grants since 2013. Some programs in Germany run a lottery-first system, where researchers draw lots for the right to submit a full application.
British Academy results
The British Academy adopted a threshold lottery in 2022 for its Small Research Grants, running a trial that has since been extended to 2028. Application numbers rose from 643 in 2022 to 1,257 in the 2025–26 cycle. Ken Emond, the academy’s head of research funding, stated that the draw signals equal odds to qualified applicants who previously opted out under the assumption that larger institutions would dominate.
The applicant pool broadened after the change. Applications from Asian and Asian British researchers increased from 13% to 19%, while their share of awarded grants rose from 11% to 17%.
Adrian Barnett, a statistician at Queensland University of Technology who conducts the academy's randomized draws, noted that the lottery delivers diversity gains without post hoc scoring adjustments. Barnett receives anonymized lists after initial quality screening and returns the funding selections the following day.
