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. 2019 Jul 2;116(27):13150-13154.
doi: 10.1073/pnas.1909217116.

Opinion: The National Institutes of Health needs to better balance funding distributions among US institutions

Wayne P Wahls  1
Affiliations

Opinion: The National Institutes of Health needs to better balance funding distributions among US institutions

Wayne P Wahls. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. .
No abstract available

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Figures

None
The NIH should rethink how it doles out funding. Studies indicate that research output does not grow linearly with the amount of research project grant support—and that the greatest rates of return are achieved with intermediate levels of funding. Image credit: Dave Cutler (artist).
Fig. 1.
Fig. 1.
Nature of the problem. The NIH favors some institutions with higher grant application success rates (A), larger award sizes (B), and more dollars per awardee (C). This occurs even though disfavored institutions provide greater returns on taxpayers’ investments (D and E). Data are for NIH research project grants 2006–2015 (mean with 95% confidence interval); returns are the total number of grant-supported publications (D) and log-transformed Relative Citation Ratios (impact) of research publications (E), each normalized to total funding. Prestigious institutions: Harvard Medical School; Stanford University; Johns Hopkins University; University of California, San Francisco; University of Pennsylvania. Less-prestigious institutions: Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis, University of Nebraska Medical Center, University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center, West Virginia University, University of South Dakota, Eastern Virginia Medical School, State University of New York at Buffalo, University of Mississippi Medical Center, University of North Dakota, Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center Shreveport. See ref. for additional information on how institutions were selected, the experimental approach, and primary data.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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