NIH recently launched several enhancements to allow the public to more easily and quickly find funding information for various NIH research areas. The new look and feel of the NIH Research, Condition, and Disease Categorization (RCDC) Categorical Spending webpage adds to NIH’s long-standing efforts to enhance transparency and accountability into NIH funding decisions and the research areas NIH supports.
RCDC launched in 2008 as a tool within NIH’s Research Portfolio Online Reporting Tools (RePORT) suite. It provides estimates of annual support level for more than 300 research, condition, and disease categories based on grants, contracts, and other funding mechanisms used across the NIH, as well as disease burden data published by the CDC National Center for Health Statistics. More on the RCDC process is available on this post from 2018.
The new visual and contextual changes aim to improved usability and understanding of the RCDC categorization process. In particular, the categorical spending page was reorganized so data are more prominent and easier to navigate.
Navigation improvements simplify finding information on FAQs, the Categorization Process, and the biomedical thesaurus. The information in the data tables are more visible due to collapsed textual information and frozen table headers (Figure 1).
When selecting a particular category, the line graph on the top left of the page will automatically adjust to reflect funding amounts over time for that topic area (Figure 2, left image). Selecting support data for a given fiscal year will also reveal information about specific projects (Figure 2, right image).
Results can be narrowed further if interested in a particular NIH Institute or Center (Figure 3). To sort in this way, a user would need to click on the dollar amount for a given disease/research area and a given fiscal year in the main table.
Application identification numbers can now be exported for funded awards for any fiscal year in any given category. Previously RCDC only reported the project number for an award. Because application IDs are unique to an individual fiscal year, it is easier to now connect results from RCDC with those obtained in other RePORT tools.
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