EFSA has commissioned a review of available scientific literature on group decision-making in regulatory science, to provide an overview of group thinking/science decision-making models and to identify examples of/benchmarking with models adopted by national/EU/international organisations.
The review aims to inform future recommendations for EFSA’s panel system.
 
EFSA commissioned the work to have solid starting points to improve the knowledge, experience, and decision-making of its external scientific experts. Indeed, EFSA's Scientific Panels are responsible for most of the organisation's evaluations; there are 10 Scientific Panels, each dedicated to a different area.
 
To support EFSA's future work in group decision-making, the literature review provided a structured database on group thinking and decision-making models and summarised the body of evidence.
 
Therefore, three products were produced: a set of 30 factsheets summarising and analysing the main contents of the articles identified for research, an overall database of the data found, and a set of other factsheets aimed at analysing the structure and decision-making method of the panels of experts (internal, but above all external) of ten other national/European and international organisations, close to EFSA either in terms of subject matter or organisational model.
 
The project is led by t33, in consortium with Teleperformance.
At the end of the contract, EFSA wanted to spread the results of the research by publishing the analysis conducted in its scientific journal.