There are, but they are fairly discouraging.<p>Peters and Ceci (1982) resubmitted a dozen articles after changing the authors&#x27; names and affiliations and retyping the manuscript (this is 1982, after all). Only 1&#x2F;12 was accepted on the second go-around, while 8&#x2F;12 were rejected for quality-related reasons.<p>Rothwell and Martin (2000) examined data from neuroscience journals and conferences (2 each), where reviewers grouped papers into three categories (high&#x2F;medium&#x2F;low), and found virtually no agreement (they calcualted kappa, a measure of agreement that ranges from 0 (none) to 1 (perfect), to be ~0.1).<p>Someone (sorry, can&#x27;t find the citation; it&#x27;s in the last year or two) recently analyzed attempted to link grant scores to subsequent publications to see if reviewers could prospectively find &quot;good&quot; proposals. The reviewers could successfully identify  terrible proposals and brilliant ones, but had a terrible time with those in the vast murky middle.