What’s My (Application) Type?

September 30, 2016

If remembering the difference between a renewal and a revision has you stumped, we have a page on types of applications that can help. Knowing what type of application you are submitting is important for a number of reasons. ….

New on “All About Grants”: NIH’s Loan Repayment Program

September 29, 2016

Tune in to a new podcast episode of “All About Grants”, a podcast for investigators, fellows, students, research administrators, and others just curious about grants policy, process, and other topics relevant to NIH’s extramural research program. Our newest episode highlights NIH’s Loan Repayment Programs. ….

Updated Resource for Biosafety Assessment Now Available

September 29, 2016

October is National Biosafety Month – a yearly reminder to refocus attention on biosafety policies, practices and procedures. …. the NIH Office of Science Policy recently updated the “Institutional Biosafety Committee Self-Assessment Tool” as a resource to help ….

Improving Visibility of NIH-supported Clinical Trial Activities and Results

September 16, 2016

In a separate post today, we provide an overview of the various reforms the NIH is leading to enhance our stewardship of clinical trials. In this post we’d like to focus a bit more on our efforts to broadly disseminate clinical trial availability and results information.

Timely dissemination of clinical trial results information has been a problem, one that has been documented more than once, and that appears to apply to NIH- as well as non-NIH funded trials. To realize the benefits of a clinical trial, the findings must be available to the public as soon as possible after the trial has concluded. This is not only responsible use of taxpayer dollars for publicly funded trials, but also fulfills our responsibility to the individuals who volunteered in these studies with an understanding that their participation would contribute to advancing medical knowledge. Today, NIH announced a new policy that will complement a new federal regulation, referred to here as the Final Rule, also released today, to improve the accessibility of information on clinical trial availability and on the outcomes and results of completed trials.

As you likely know, to carry out the laws passed by Congress, federal agencies issue regulations that govern the activities of the agency and the applicable community. The “Final Rule” announced today by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services is …

Building Better Clinical Trials through Stewardship and Transparency

September 16, 2016

NIH is the largest public funder of clinical trials in the United States. As stewards of this research enterprise, we have been actively listening and discussing how to overcome hurdles and shortcomings that we, and others in the research community, have identified. If you’ve been following the conversation, you’ll know that NIH already has implemented some key reforms to enhance clinical trial stewardship. Today, in a Viewpoint Essay published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), we provide an overview of how these reforms, and new initiatives, fit in to the broader picture of building a better clinical trial enterprise through better stewardship, accountability, and transparency.

Figure 1 illustrates the clinical trial “lifespan”, and key opportunities for improving the quality and efficiency of clinical trials – opportunities that translate into more innovative and robust clinical trial design, and accelerated discoveries that will advance human health. NIH is leading a multi-faceted effort that addresses shortcomings and challenges throughout this lifespan, including the application and award process; the scientific review of trial applications; post-award management and oversight; sharing of trial data; and dissemination of research results information to the public. ….

Measuring Impact of NIH-supported Publications with a New Metric: the Relative Citation Ratio

September 8, 2016

In previous blogs, we talked about citation measures as one metric for scientific productivity. Raw citation counts are inherently problematic – different fields cite at different rates, and citation counts rise and fall in the months to years after a publication appears. Therefore, a number of bibliometric scholars have focused on developing methods that measure citation impact while also accounting for field of study and time of publication. We are pleased to report that on September 6, PLoS Biology published a paper from our NIH colleagues in the Office of Portfolio Analysis on “The Relative Citation Ratio: A New Metric that Uses Citation Rates to Measure Influence at the Article Level.” Before we delve into the details and look at some real data, ….