New “All About Grants” Podcast on Managing Conflicts of Interest in Peer Review

October 28, 2019

In this next installment of the NIH’s All About Grants podcast series, we talk about how NIH manages conflicts of interest to ensure that we maintain integrity throughout the peer review process. Sally Amero, Ph.D., NIH’s Review Policy Officer, joins us and explains why it is important to manage these conflicts, what is and is not a potential conflict, how to disclose conflicts, and who is involved throughout the peer review process.

New NIH Resource to Analyze Biomedical Research Citations: The Open Citation Collection

October 16, 2019

My colleagues within the NIH Office of Portfolio Analysis sought to answer this call. Drs. Ian Hutchins and George Santangelo embarked on a hefty bibliometric endeavor over the past several years to curate biomedical citation data. They aggregated over 420 million citation links from sources like Medline, PubMed Central, Entrez, CrossRef, and other unrestricted, open-access datasets. With this information in hand, we can now take a better glimpse into relationships between basic and applied research, into how a researchers’ works are cited, and into ways to make large-scale analyses of citation metrics easier and free.

Delving Further into the Funding Gap Between White and Black Researchers

October 10, 2019

In a paper recently published in Science Advances, we delved into the underlying factors associated with the funding gap between white and black researchers. We identified three decision points where disparate outcomes arose between white and black researchers: 1) the decision to bring applications to discussion during peer review study section meetings; 2) impact score assignments for those applications brought to discussion; and (3) a previously unstudied factor, topic choice – that is what topic the investigators chose to study.

Reminder to Review Accuracy of Grant Information Before October 11

October 3, 2019

We make data on all funded NIH grants available to the public on the RePORT website. One of the ways we provide information is by school/department, which you can explore using the Awards by Location feature. Because of inconsistencies in the way information on department and school names are provided in grant applications, grantee officials may want to make changes in how that information is reflected in NIH systems.

When in Doubt, Reach Out

October 2, 2019

When you can’t find what you need online, don’t hesitate to reach out to NIH staff. Often, the best folks to talk to will be in one of the NIH institutes or Centers. Our Contacting Staff at the NIH Institutes and Centers page can help you understand the roles of NIH staff and help you contact the right person at each phase of the application and award process.