Extramural News: Open Mike 4/16/18
Impact of Teams Receiving NIH Funding
NIH Deputy Director Mike Lauer, MD, discusses the increasing use of teams in science in an Open Mike blog post. Noting this trend in both research and review papers, Dr. Lauer examines this topic further using a portfolio analysis tool iSearch to gather data on NIH grants between 1995 and 2017. He presents data showing that the number of authors on papers has increased, a trend that is also true for R, P, and U grants alone. Data using the relative citation ratio (RCR) also show that papers with a higher author count are cited more often, and therefore presumably are more influential in their field.
Do Reviewers Read References? If so, does it impact their Scores?
NIH Deputy Director Mike Lauer, MD discusses the role that references play in a grant review. To determine if peer reviewers include references in their evaluation, the NIH surveyed 1000 previous reviewers to ask if they looked up any references the last time they were a primary reviewer, along with followup questions.
Looking for a NIH Program Official in your Research Area?
The Matchmaker feature in NIH RePORTER was recently enhanced to make it easier to identify NIH program officials whose portfolios include projects in your research area. To search, enter up to 15,000 characters of scientific text, and Matchmaker will match your research with up to 500 similar projects and will provide relevant program officials under the new Program Official tab of NIH RePORTER.