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In 2021, we wrote that appropriately acknowledging NIH grant support allows us to properly assess award outputs and make recommendations for future research directions. This is a term and condition of award under long-standing federal law. Our Grants and Funding site provides guidance: grants should only be cited if they directly supported the work described in the paper and work described in the paper is clearly within scope of the grant award. We still see examples, though, of researchers improperly overciting grants that are unrelated with the research, be it an honest error or intentional. This post revisits the issue as a reminder for the research community about the importance of properly citing NIH grant support and accurately representing funding support for the published study.
NIH Grants Policy Statement Section 4.2.1 states “all HHS recipients must acknowledge Federal funding when issuing statements, press releases, requests for proposals, bid invitations, and other documents describing projects or programs funded in whole or in part with Federal money.” Therefore, researchers are required to acknowledge NIH grants that support the work described in their papers, but only if they contributed to the project.
Though we do not collect data on how often overcitation happens, we come across it in different ways. We have seen situations where an NIH grant was linked to a paper, yet private sector sponsors or non-federal grants fully supported the research. Some of these come to our attention because NIH systems like My Bibliography connect publications and grants. It takes effort to untangle these errors when working out the details with the researchers involved.
Sometimes we see publications that cite many grants. If the research does not involve something like a large-scale multi-site clinical trial network that would involve several awards, we may take a closer look. If warranted, we reach out to the recipient to learn more about whether the grants were cited correctly or not. Maybe there was an honest mistake? Or, maybe it was intentional?
Here are a couple of recent examples:
- One published study reported on research involving human participants, yet the grant that was acknowledged did not allow for human participant research. This led to concerns that the researchers may have violated laws that protect human subjects. Applications that propose work with humans also undergo additional scrutiny during peer review to ensure proper human subjects’ policies are followed. We found out the researcher on the original paper simply cited that unrelated grant because they thought it would benefit them in some way.
- A paper cited a grant as the source of support, but the author was not linked to the award. The grant, however, was awarded to the institution where the author worked. The content of the grant had nothing to do with what was discussed in the paper. It came to our attention because the National Library of Medicine contacted the designated principal investigator on the grant (who was not one of the paper’s authors) directing the researcher to deposit the paper in PubMed Central. As the principal investigator and the cited grant had nothing to do with the paper, there was no obligation to deposit it. The author on the paper cited the grant deliberately without the knowledge of the principal investigator.
There are times when an author will cite an NIH grant to disclose potential or perceived conflicts of interest. We appreciate the transparency, but receiving salary support on another NIH grant is not an inherent conflict of interest. This is because the grant funds go to the institution, not the researcher. We would recommend that if a researcher wants to be transparent about salary support from another grant, to clearly state to the journal that the separate grant did not support the research reported in the article.
We are paying attention to overcitation as part of our proper stewardship of taxpayer funds and to assure that the results of NIH funding are properly reported. We appreciate your efforts to assure that researchers cite grant support in their publications only if the support directly contributed to the published study.
Hi,
Thank you for clarifying this.
I have few questions. I am funded by NIH which covers part of my salary and some lab expenditure. I am also funded by other foundation grants which cover other parts of my salary and lab expenditure. If I wrote a paper, should I only cite the grant which has funded this research and acknowledge that my salary is also supported by other funding agencies? Should I provide the grant number for all the funding?
Also, if I write a review article, should I cite all the funding agencies?
Please suggest.
Thank you
I agree with your concerns about overcitation of NIH grants. I have met some investigators that cite all of their grants on all of their publications, for example, and agree that is wrong. But there is also a large gray zone where resources generated by a specific NIH grant end up being used in part to support a different project. A simple example is a piece of equipment necessary for Grant A, but which is not used all of the time, and which is used for an unrelated project. It seems appropriate for Grant A to be cited as supporting that other project (because it did), even though that was not its original intent. Another gray area arises when investigators whose salary is supported almost entirely by NIH grants gets involved in other collaborations. These collaborations may even be relevant to the grants that support him/her. But they will be for work that is beyond the scope of those applications, and may not even have been thought of at the time those applications were submitted. In fact, generating preliminary data for your next application is a common activity, which is of course not supported by your previous grant, yet almost everyone does it. The intellectual ferment of research always produces people and methods and equipment that contribute in ways that were not envisioned in the original grant application, but which are important and relevant, and we would not want it any other way. It is sensible for them to acknowledge their sources of support, even if they extend beyond what someone thought of five years ago (or even in the most recent RPPR).
This is helpful, thank you!
What about a situation in which there are two grants supporting work in a lab that use the same method, grant/project A and grant/project B. If grant A is used to replace or repair a piece of equipment that is also used in project B, would it be appropriate, when publishing the findings of project B, to cite grant A?
Or the situation in which a graduate student thesis has a chapter related to project A and a chapter related to project B. A supported the student for their first 2 years and B supported the student for the next 2 years. During the time the student was supported by grant B they completed editorial work on the chapter relating to project A. Is it appropriate to cite B as a source of project support — even though it wasn’t the primary award?
Here is another common situation in my field: researchers (co-authors) who collaborate on a project but work at different universities each of which has a center or lab (funded by one NIH grant such as a P30, P50, or other mechanism) that provides an environment and infrastructure making the research possible; plus one or more R01 grants that support the researchers’ and RAs’ salaries for working on the project itself. Shouldn’t the R01(s) and the center/lab grants be cited on the co-authored article?
These are great examples! What about the situation where an investigator uses NIH funding to create a dataset in study A and private funding to reuse the dataset for study B? Such a study would meet condition 1 but not condition 2 (below); however, without the NIH funding, study B would not be possible. Would it make a difference if Study B is closely related to the original scope of work for Study A, even if not within it?
“…grants should only be cited if they directly supported the work described in the paper [condition 1] and work described in the paper is clearly within scope of the grant award [condition 2].
If a PhD student is funded by an NIH grant and also works on their thesis projects which are related to the grant but not the exact aims-topics of the grant, how should those publications be handled? Up to this point we have cited the grant for anything the PhD student published while 100% funded on the grant but now it seems that is incorrect? I assume it is still correct that any data collected during and used for other publications but for other analyses than originally proposed should still acknowledge the grant?
As per usual, it is an error for NIH to think that it can change the behavior of people within this highly competitive extramural ecosphere without changing the contingencies.
In your first example the PI doesn’t just think it will benefit them, they know it will. While the benefits are stochastic and unpredictable, in general the perception of amazing productivity on a grant award plays into the PI’s favor. The favorably-disposed reviewer of subsequent proposals will simply mention the productivity level without dividing by the number of grants cited per paper. Any attempt by a critical reviewer to try to unpack over-citation of grants or to attempt to argue for fairness about productivity per NIH dollar awarded then becomes an uphill struggle against a strong headwind. One reason for this is that it may actually be the case that projects on two separate grants have areas of intersection and overlap and it can be impossible to really draw the kind of hard line you are imagining. Woe betide any PI who goes through an entire 5 year interval of funding and doesn’t have a single paper attributed. This can kill their career forever so the impetus to cite it on something, no matter how tangentially related, is intense.
Even when it comes to different species, a major cost to the grant award is often the PI’s time and effort- sure they didn’t literally pay for a rat study from a human grant, but how do you forensically account for thinking time if it is the same translational subject matter?
Program likewise encourages over-citing. The PO is happy with you when you have attributed a lot of published work, hopefully every Progress Report, and is likely to be disappointed when you do not. It sets a tone. They may even threaten you, implicitly or explicitly, with terminating the project early if you haven’t produced. And in the more general sense, one would be a fool to think that it is totally neutral, come time to need a pickup, for a PO to view you as minimally versus highly productive.
On a more meta NIH policy level, the misguided mutterings about efficiency of overall funding level over the years, most pointedly from NIGMS, tell PIs that they should cite funded awards generously. The NIH ruminations and attempts to set policy on funding limits contributes to a perception that the more grant citations you can put on every paper, the better.
So if you want to move the needle on this, you have to change the contingencies.
My biggest concern when you do something like this, i.e., tut tut at the masses but don’t really change the contingencies, is that you further disadvantage newcomers and those less well integrated into the system. Those are the PIs who are going to adhere most strictly to the letter and spirit of the law. The insiders….the long termers…those with a lot of experience with the hidden curriculum…those will be the PIs who keep right on pushing the limits to enhance their profile as an amazingly productive researcher. I was trained in a reasonably grant active environment as a new Assistant Professor and I was still blown away at my first one or two study section meetings to see how this particular trend of generous grant citation on papers drove perceptions of productivity that were very explicitly linked to good grant scores.
nailed it!
100%
Thank you for addressing this. As junior faculty, I am often pressured by senior mentors and collaborators to cite their unrelated grants on my independent papers which are completely out of scope and to which that PI made zero contribution, simply because I have minor support (2-5% effort) on their grant. It is not an error, it is deliberate. The policy is very generally interpreted to rationalize this, based on the idea that we should give credit to any source of support for our time. However, it creates a false record of a specific grant’s productivity on progress reports, and also can inflate the established investigators compared with new investigators.
Very helpful article. Could you please clarify the statement, “receiving salary support on another NIH grant is not an inherent conflict of interest. This is because the grant funds go to the institution, not the researcher.” Using this same logic, it would not be a conflict of interest for a research project to receive in-kind contributions from industry, because those contributions go to the investigator’s institution. It seems like journals want investigators to report that.
What about consortium papers with 50+ authors A,B,C,D,E,F,G,H, … Surely, we need to thank NIH for funding our friends who likely end up being our peers on study sections and promote fashionable diseases & approaches. It’s important for communal success to maintain the old-PI network …
Regarding the example provided:
“One published study reported on research involving human participants, yet the grant that was acknowledged did not allow for human participant research. This led to concerns that the researchers may have violated laws that protect human subjects. Applications that propose work with humans also undergo additional scrutiny during peer review to ensure proper human subjects’ policies are followed. We found out the researcher on the original paper simply cited that unrelated grant because they thought it would benefit them in some way.”
Here is my counter argument. My NIH grant led to the development of a technology that I applied to a subsequent study with human samples. It is true that the grant did not have human subjects, but the technology used was supported by the grant, so I think it is appropriate to cite the grant as partially supporting the study that used human subjects. Obviously, there was other support involved, informed consent, and IRB approval for the study with human subjects.