Abstract
The ability of the United States to most efficiently make breakthroughs on the biology, diagnosis and treatment of human diseases requires that physicians and scientists in each state have equal access to federal research grants and grant dollars. However, despite legislative and administrative efforts to ensure equal access, the majority of funding for biomedical research is concentrated in a minority of states. To gain insight into the causes of such disparity, funding metrics were examined for all NIH research project grants (RPGs) from 2004 to 2013. State-by-state differences in per application success rates, per investigator funding rates, and average award size each contributed significantly to vast disparities (greater than 100-fold range) in per capita RPG funding to individual states. To the extent tested, there was no significant association overall between scientific productivity and per capita funding, suggesting that the unbalanced allocation of funding is unrelated to the quality of scientists in each state. These findings reveal key sources of bias in, and new insight into the accuracy of, the funding process. They also support evidence-based recommendations for how the NIH could better utilize the scientific talent and capacity that is present throughout the United States.
Highlights
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) is the federal steward of biomedical research in the United States
If one considers the data by funding rank quartile (Fig. 1 and Data S1), nearly two thirds of all research project grants (RPGs) dollars were allocated to one quarter of the states
Such disparities have existed for decades and have persisted despite best intentions of the Institutional Development Award (IDeA) program (Committee to Evaluate the Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research et al, 2013; National Institutes of Health, 2015)
Summary
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) is the federal steward of biomedical research in the United States. Ensuring equal access to research grants and grant dollars, geographically, is a fundamental tenant of the NIH’s mission to manage a diverse, robust and sustainable research ecosystem that maximizes return on taxpayers’ investments (Lorsch, 2015). The congressional mandate included ‘‘to strengthen basic research and education in the sciences...throughout the United States...and to avoid undue concentration of such research and education’’ (emphasis added). Creation of the Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR) in 1979 extended this mandate and increased support to disadvantaged states that were receiving a relatively small share of NSF funds (EPSCoR/IDeA Foundation, 2015). How to cite this article Wahls (2016), Biases in grant proposal success rates, funding rates and award sizes affect the geographical distribution of funding for biomedical research.
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