Extension Policy for K99/R00 Eligibility

November 4, 2019

NIH recognizes that a lot can happen to interrupt the 4-year K99 eligibility window. Since one of the most popular reasons for extension requests involve childbirth, NIH will approve an extension of one year for childbirth, consistent with the NIH Extension Policy for Early Stage Investigator Status (ESI), effective immediately. Men, those adopting children, and same-sex partners of individuals giving birth can also apply for an extension.

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.