Abstract
The NIH is the major federal biomedical research funding agency within the United States, and NIH funding has become a priority in institutional decisions on faculty recruitment, salary, promotion, and tenure. The implicit assumption is that well-funded investigators will maintain their funding success; however, our analysis of NIH awardees from 2000 to 2015 suggests that regardless of how well funded an investigator is, their research portfolio exhibits “regression to the mean,” matching the typical NIH funding profile within just 10–15 years. Thus, outperformance in past funding is not a strong predictor of future outperformance in funding success. This study indicates that faculty performance should not be solely judged upon grant success but should include other institutional mission priorities such as provision of clinical care, education, and service to community/profession.
Highlights
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) funds most of the federal biomedical research within the United States
Success in R01 funding is the predominant factor in faculty recruitment, salary, promotion, tenure, resources, and space allocation
SOM/Academic Medical Centers (AMCs) strategic plans value the recruitment of Principal Investigators (PIs) that hold multiple R01s
Summary
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) funds most of the federal biomedical research within the United States. We directly counted how many of the individuals that had funding during our four probes lost that funding during the 15-year analysis time frame (total discrete investigators in our cohort was 24,866). To graph the mean outperformance of cohorts, the proportion of investigators above the NIH average funding profile at each interval of 5, 10, and 15 years was generated (i.e., area between the curve).
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