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. 2011 Jul-Aug;18(4):423-31.
doi: 10.1136/amiajnl-2011-000213. Epub 2011 Apr 27.

Metrics associated with NIH funding: a high-level view

Kevin W Boyack  1 , Paul Jordan
Affiliations

Metrics associated with NIH funding: a high-level view

Kevin W Boyack et al. J Am Med Inform Assoc. 2011 Jul-Aug.

Abstract

Objective: To introduce the availability of grant-to-article linkage data associated with National Institutes of Health (NIH) grants and to perform a high-level analysis of the publication outputs and impacts associated with those grants.

Design: Articles were linked to the grants they acknowledge using the grant acknowledgment strings in PubMed using a parsing and matching process as embodied in the NIH Scientific Publication Information Retrieval & Evaluation System system. Additional data from PubMed and citation counts from Scopus were added to the linkage data. The data comprise 2,572,576 records from 1980 to 2009.

Results: The data show that synergies between NIH institutes are increasing over time; 29% of current articles acknowledge grants from multiple institutes. The median time lag to publication for a new grant is 3 years. Each grant contributes to approximately 1.7 articles per year, averaged over all grant types. Articles acknowledging US Public Health Service (PHS, which includes NIH) funding are cited twice as much as US-authored articles acknowledging no funding source. Articles acknowledging both PHS funding and a non-US government funding source receive on average 40% more citations that those acknowledging PHS funding sources alone.

Conclusion: The US PHS is effective at funding research with a higher-than-average impact. The data are amenable to further and much more detailed analysis.

PubMed Disclaimer

Conflict of interest statement

Competing interests: Although KWB is employed by SciTech Strategies, no patent or product based on this work is under development.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Time series of grant-related quantities by initial grant year.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Author order for principal investigators from the grant-to-article matches by publication year. F, first author; L, last author; M, middle author.
Figure 3
Figure 3
Funding type distribution by year. N, non-US government funding; O, other US government funding; P, PHS funding.
Figure 4
Figure 4
Average citation counts per paper as a function of funding type using the publication groupings of figure 3. N, non-US government funding; O, other US government funding; P, PHS funding.
Figure 5
Figure 5
Average citation counts per paper as a function of funding type using the only those publications that are matched by NIH grant strings in PubMed records. N, non-US government funding; O, other US government funding; P, PHS funding.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

References

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