Federal Research Funding Research Articles

T32 programs in emergency medicine: A report from the ACEP-SAEM Federal Research Funding Workgroup.

Advancing care in Emergency Medicine (EM) requires the development of well-trained researchers, but our specialty has lower amounts of research funding compared to similar medical fields. Increasing the number of pathways available for research training supports the growth of new investigators. To address the need for more EM researchers, the Society of Academic Emergency Medicine and the American College of Emergency Physicians convened a Federal Research Funding Workgroup. Here, we report the workgroup recommendations regarding the creation of Research Training Fellowships using the T32 grant structure sponsored by the National Institutes of Health. After reviewing the history of NIH-grant supported research fellowships in EM, we outline the rationale and describe the core components of T32-supported research fellowships, including program design, fellow evaluation, and recruitment considerations.

A Scoping Review of Intimate Partner Violence Research in Canada.

Intimate partner violence (IPV) is at epidemic levels across low-, middle-, and high-income countries, including Canada, where recent lifetime prevalence indicated that over 40% of women had IPV experiences. In response to this, Canada's federal government has made investments toward IPV prevention and response. We conducted a scoping review of English and French literature identified through searches of multiple databases and specific journals to assess the current state of IPV research in Canada. A total of 267 articles met inclusion criteria of being peer-reviewed research primarily about IPV in either French or English published from 2020 to 2022 with at least one Canadian-affiliated author. Almost a third of studies described services for survivors but did not evaluate service effectiveness. We noted a significant gap in research on the IPV experiences of gender and/or sexual minorities. Canada's federal social science research funding agency was the most common funder, with the two federal government departments with specific IPV funding initiatives in place cited as funding less than 6% of included studies. In general, there remains an overfocus on IPV epidemiology and on descriptions of service use, and not enough research examining the effectiveness and implementation of interventions, especially grounded in theoretical, gendered, and trauma- and violence-informed frameworks. Funders and researchers are encouraged to consider moving resources from ongoing description of well-established factors to assessment and implementation of evidence-informed interventions, and, crucially, primary prevention of IPV and all forms of gender-based violence.

Using Federal, State, and Grassroots Advocacy to Effect Change in Cancer Care Delivery and Patient Outcomes in the United States.

Health policy influences health and well-being for patients with cancer. Advocating for evidence-based health policies that aim to prevent cancer, promote health, and improve efficiencies in the health care system is crucial to improving care delivery and cancer outcomes nationwide. The role of the ASCO's Government Relations Committee (GRC) is to advocate for policies at a federal and state level that promote high-quality and equitable cancer care, and ASCO volunteer engagement is critical for the success of creating, changing, and adopting policies that support patients with cancer and their care team. Cancer care professionals are uniquely positioned to advocate at all levels of government, local, state, and federal and to serve as invaluable resources for lawmakers as they work to implement policy changes. Lawmakers are highly responsive to cancer care providers as most lawmakers have family or friends who have been diagnosed with cancer. Multiple advocacy strategies that are effective and efficient in their approach have been used, making advocating feasible for cancer care professionals' busy schedule. To improve patient care, ASCO's GRC and ASCO volunteers advocate for increased federal funding for research, greater health care access, value in cancer care, and payment reform. ASCO's GRC has many programs in place to support ASCO members interested in engaging in advocacy to improve the quality of care for their patients and the support for cancer care professionals to thrive in the field.

Federal and foundational research funding trends for cerebrovascular neurosurgeons: the decline of the cerebrovascular surgeon-scientist?

The number of cerebrovascular (CV) surgeons has grown with the rise of endovascular neurosurgery. However, it is unclear whether the number of CV surgeon-scientists has concomitantly increased. With increasing numbers of CV neurosurgeons in the US workforce, the authors analyzed associated changes in National Institutes of Health (NIH) and Neurosurgery Research and Education Foundation (NREF) funding trends for CV surgeons over time. Publicly available data were collected on currently practicing academic CV surgeons in the US. Inflation-adjusted NIH funding between 2009 and 2021 was surveyed using NIH RePORTER and Blue Ridge Institute for Medical Research data. The K12 Neurosurgeon Research Career Development Program and NREF grant data were queried for CV-focused grants. Pearson R correlation, chi-square analysis, and the Mann-Whitney U-test were used for statistical analysis. From 2009 to 2021, NIH funding increased: in total (p = 0.0318), to neurosurgeons (p < 0.0001), to CV research projects (p < 0.0001), and to CV surgeons (p = 0.0018). During this time period, there has been an increase in the total number of CV surgeons (p < 0.0001), the number of NIH-funded CV surgeons (p = 0.0034), and the percentage of CV surgeons with NIH funding (p = 0.370). Additionally, active NIH grant dollars per CV surgeon (p = 0.0398) and the number of NIH grants per CV surgeon (p = 0.4257) have increased. Nevertheless, CV surgeons have been awarded a decreasing proportion of the overall pool of neurosurgeon-awarded NIH grants during this time period (p = 0.3095). In addition, there has been a significant decrease in the number of K08, K12, and K23 career development awards granted to CV surgeons during this time period (p = 0.0024). There was also a significant decline in the proportion of K12 (p = 0.0044) and downtrend in early-career NREF (p = 0.8978) grant applications and grants awarded during this time period. Finally, NIH-funded CV surgeons were more likely to have completed residency less recently (p = 0.001) and less likely to have completed an endovascular fellowship (p = 0.044) as compared with non-NIH-funded CV surgeons. The number of CV surgeons is increasing over time. While there has been a concomitant increase in the number of NIH-funded CV surgeons and the number of NIH grants awarded per CV surgeon in the past 12 years, there has also been a significant decrease in CV surgeons with K08, K12, and K23 career development awards and a downtrend in CV-focused K12 and early-career NREF applications and awarded grants. The latter findings suggest that the pipeline for future NIH-funded CV surgeons may be in decline.

Investigating the Roles and Responsibilities of Institutional Signing Officials After Data Sharing Policy Reform for Federally Funded Research in the United States: National Survey.

New federal policies along with rapid growth in data generation, storage, and analysis tools are together driving scientific data sharing in the United States. At the same, triangulating human research data from diverse sources can also create situations where data are used for future research in ways that individuals and communities may consider objectionable. Institutional gatekeepers, namely, signing officials (SOs), are therefore at the helm of compliant management and sharing of human data for research. Of those with data governance responsibilities, SOs most often serve as signatories for investigators who deposit, access, and share research data between institutions. Although SOs play important leadership roles in compliant data sharing, we know surprisingly little about their scope of work, roles, and oversight responsibilities. The purpose of this study was to describe existing institutional policies and practices of US SOs who manage human genomic data access, as well as how these may change in the wake of new Data Management and Sharing requirements for National Institutes of Health-funded research in the United States. We administered an anonymous survey to institutional SOs recruited from biomedical research institutions across the United States. Survey items probed where data generated from extramurally funded research are deposited, how researchers outside the institution access these data, and what happens to these data after extramural funding ends. In total, 56 institutional SOs participated in the survey. We found that SOs frequently approve duplicate data deposits and impose stricter access controls when data use limitations are unclear or unspecified. In addition, 21% (n=12) of SOs knew where data from federally funded projects are deposited after project funding sunsets. As a consequence, most investigators deposit their scientific data into "a National Institutes of Health-funded repository" to meet the Data Management and Sharing requirements but also within the "institution's own repository" or a third-party repository. Our findings inform 5 policy recommendations and best practices for US SOs to improve coordination and develop comprehensive and consistent data governance policies that balance the need for scientific progress with effective human data protections.

Efficacy of Centers of Biomedical Research Excellence (CoBRE) grants to build research capacity in underrepresented states.

Federal funding for research has immediate and long-term economic impact. Since federal research funding is regionally concentrated and not geographically distributed, the benefits are not fully realized in some regions of the country. The Established (previously Experimental) Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR) programs at several agencies, for example, the National Science Foundation, and the Institutional Development Award (IDeA) program at the National Institutes of Health were created to increase competitiveness for funding in states with historically low levels of federal funding. The Centers of Biomedical Research Excellence (CoBRE) award program is a component of the IDeA program. The CoBRE grants support research core facilities to develop research infrastructure. These grants also support the research projects of junior investigators, under the guidance of mentoring teams of senior investigators, to develop human resources at these institutions. Few studies have assessed the effectiveness of these programs. This study examines the investment and outcomes of the CoBRE grants from 2000 through 2022. The maturation of junior investigators into independently funded principal investigators is comparable to other mentoring programs supported by NIH. The investment in research cores resulted in substantial research productivity, measured by publications. Despite the successes of individual investigators and increased research infrastructure and productivity, the geographic distribution of federal and NIH research dollars has not changed. These results will be informative in consideration of policies designed to enhance the geographic distribution of federal research dollars.

Underfunding for Research Training and Career Development: The Impact on Family Medicine Research.

The National Institutes of Health and related federal awards for research training (RT) and research career development (RCD) are designed to prepare applicants for research careers. We compared funding rates for RT and RCD for anesthesiology, dermatology, emergency medicine, family medicine, internal medicine, neurology, obstetrics-gynecology, pathology, pediatrics, and psychiatry. We estimated the denominator using the number of residency graduates from different specialties from 2001 to 2010 from the Association of American Medical Colleges data. For the numerator, we used published data on federally funded awards by specialty from 2011 to 2020. We also examined the correlation between RCD funding and overall research funding. Family medicine had the lowest rate per graduating resident for RT (0.01%) and RCD (0.77%) awards among 10 specialties and was lower than the mean/median for the other nine specialties, ranging from 2.15%/1.19% and 9.83%/8.74%. We found a strong correlation between rates of RCD awards and mean federal funding per active physician, which was statistically significant (ρ=0.77, P=.0098). Comparatively low rates for family medicine awards for RT and RCD plausibly contribute to poor federal funding for family medicine research, underscoring the need to bolster the research career pathway in family medicine.

Disciplinary and institutional diversity of federally funded academic research on climate solutions in the United States

To meet the demands of technological change required for climate change mitigation, academic research must cover a broad range of climate solutions. Diverse participation in this research is important because research shows that a variety of backgrounds and problem-solving approaches are important to solving complex problems such as climate change. In our study, we examine the discplinary and institutional diversity of federal funding for academic research on climate solutions (ARCS) in the United States. We identify $1.42 billion in federal funding for ARCS in fiscal years 2019 and 2020. Our findings reveal that 85% of federal ARCS grants are awarded to Principal Investigators in engineering and the natural sciences. Additionally, institutions classified as having high research activity (R1s) receive over 60% of the ARCS funding per student. Tribal institutions, Historically Black Colleges and Universities, and Hispanic Serving Institutions collectively receive only $109.20 in ARCS funding per student, compared to $334.30 per student for other institution types. These disparities in federally funded ARCS grants are, in part, a consequence of the absence of policies that promote interdisciplinary collaboration and broader participation in academic research. We discuss the policy implications that have contributed to the identified inequities in ARCS funding and current policies that could enhance the distribution of ARCS in the future. We propose strategies for federally funded ARCS to support an equitable energy transition that addresses the needs of contemporary society and beyond.

Rebalancing commercial and public interests in prioritizing biomedical, social and environmental aspects of health through defining and managing conflicts of interest.

Biomedical research is intended to benefit human beings and their health. Toward that end, scientific norms involve examining and criticizing the work of others and prioritizing questions that should be studied. Yet, in areas of health research where industry is active, it has often utilized well-honed strategies aimed at evading scientific standards and at dominating the research agenda, largely through its financial support and lack of transparency of its research practices. These tactics have now been documented to uniformly support industry products. Commercial entities are aided in this pursuit by public policy that has significantly embedded commercial interests and agendas into federal research funding and infrastructure. Therefore, to understand the resulting landscape and its effect on priority in health research agendas, traditional definitions of individual conflicts of interest (COI) and the less well developed institutional COI must be supplemented by a new construct of structural COI, largely operating as intellectual monopolies, in support of industry. These arrangements often result in financial and reputational resources that assure dominance of commercial priorities in research agendas, crowding out any other interests and ignoring justified returns to the public from investment of its tax dollars. There is no sustained attention to mechanisms by which public interests can be heard, normative issues raised, and then balanced with commercial interests which are transparently reported. Focus on research supporting approval of commercial products ignores social and environmental determinants of health. Commercial bias can invalidate regulatory research protections through obscuring valid risk-benefit ratios considered by IRBs.

Factors Assessing Science’s Self-Presentation model and their effect on conservatives’ and liberals’ support for funding science

A confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) of responses to 13 questions from a 2022 national probability sample of 1,154 US adults supported the existence of five factors that we argue assess perceptions of Factors Assessing Science's Self-Presentation (FASS). These factors also predict support for increasing federal funding of science and, separately, supporting federal funding of basic research. Each of the factors reflects perceptions of a key facet of scientists' self-presentation, science/scientists' adherence to professed norms, or science's benefits: specifically, that scientists are Credible, Prudent, and Unbiased and that science is Self-Correcting and Beneficial. The FASS model explained 40.6% of the variance in support for increasing federal funding for science and 33.7% in support for basic research. For both dependent variables, conservatives were less likely to be supportive when they perceived that science/scientists fail to overcome biases. The interactions between political ideology and both Prudence and Beneficial, however, were significant only when predicting Basic Research support. In that case, there were no differences between conservatives and liberals when perceptions of benefit were low, but when high, liberals' perception of benefit had a stronger association with support for funding than conservatives'. Among those perceiving that scientists lack prudence, liberals were more likely to support funding basic research than conservatives, but the difference disappeared when perceptions of prudence were very high. The factors could serve as across-time indicators of the public's assessment of the state of science.

Academic career progression in AANS/CNS Spine Section award recipients.

The American Association of Neurological Surgeons (AANS)/Congress of Neurological Surgeons (CNS) Joint Spine Section awards highlight outstanding abstracts submitted to the AANS/CNS Section on Disorders of the Spine and Peripheral Nerves by trainees interested in spine surgery, although the academic trajectory of awardees has not been studied. The aim of this study was to assess the academic career progression of prior recipients of the Journalistic and Academic Neurosurgical Excellence (JANE), Mayfield, and Kuntz research awards. Prior JANE, Mayfield, and Kuntz award recipients were identified using awardee records accrued between 1984 and February 2022. Awardee sex, country of residence, specialty, subspecialty focus, and current academic appointment status (if applicable) were searched online. Awardee h-indices and number of peer-reviewed publications were assessed via Google Scholar profiles (or Scopus if unavailable) and PubMed, respectively. Receipt of federal research funding as principal investigator (PI) was determined using the websites of the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, and the Department of Defense Congressionally Directed Medical Research Programs. The abstract-to-publication rate was assessed. A total of 7 JANE awards, 57 Mayfield awards, and 149 Kuntz awards were identified. Of the JANE awardees, all recipients were male. Of the 4 unique JANE awardees who completed training, 2 (50.0%) held academic appointments at the time of the study. All of the JANE abstracts were published in peer-reviewed journals. The mean h-index of all JANE awardees was 28 and the mean number of publications was 126. None of the awardees have received federal research funding. Of the Mayfield awards, 98.2% were awarded to males. Of the 43 unique Mayfield awardees who completed training, 20 (46.5%) held faculty appointments at academic medical centers. All of the Mayfield abstracts since 2011 were published in peer-reviewed journals. The mean h-index of all Mayfield awardees was 26 and the mean number of publications was 82. Five Mayfield awardees received National Institutes of Health funding as PI, and 7 awardees received Department of Defense funding as PI. Of the Kuntz awards, 95.3% were awarded to males. Most awards were given to current residents and fellows (46.3%). Of the 55 unique Kuntz awardees who completed training, 31 (56.4%) held faculty appointments at academic medical centers. The abstract-to-publication rate of the total Kuntz abstracts was 70.5%. The mean h-index of all Kuntz awardees was 15 and the mean number of publications was 58. Five Kuntz awardees (3.4%) received federal research funding as PI. Many recipients of the JANE, Mayfield, and Kuntz Joint Spine Section awards have successfully translated award abstracts into peer-reviewed publications. Furthermore, approximately one-third of the awardees are active in academic neurosurgery, with some having secured federal research funding.

Extramural US Federal Research Grants For Health Outcomes Associated With Climate Change Inadequate, Too Narrow In Focus.

Climate change causes and exacerbates disease, creates and worsens health disparities, disrupts health care delivery, and imposes a significant disease burden in the US and globally. Critical knowledge gaps hinder an evidence-based response and are perpetuated by scarce federal research funds. We identified and described extramural US federal research funding (that is, grants provided to organizations and institutions outside of federal agencies) that both addressed health outcomes associated with climate change and was awarded between 2010 and 2020. During this eleven-year period, 102 grants met our criteria, totaling approximately $58.7million, or approximately $5.3million per year (2020 adjusted US dollars). Federal investments in climate change and health research during this period failed to address the breadth of climate-sensitive exposures, health outcomes, and impacts on vulnerable populations. Moving forward, in addition to increasing investment in climate and health research across all known hazards, critical attention should be placed on vulnerable populations and health equity. To achieve this, increased federal research coordination and cooperation are needed, as well as a mechanism to track this funding.

Challenges and opportunities for research clinicians interested in pain: results of a survey.

The National Institutes of Health and its independent advisors recognize the need to develop a strong pain research workforce and provide opportunities, particularly for clinicians, to pursue research careers. A survey was conducted to better understand the challenges facing the clinical pain research community. Respondents reported that time and funding to pursue research were the most critical factors either enabling or holding them back from a research career. Respondents who received some kind of formal research training or mentorship were more likely than those who did not to have federal research funding and to be at more advanced stages of their careers. The findings point to a need for all stakeholders in the pain research community to help formalize research training and provide funding or protected time to support the ambitions of aspiring researchers.

Research Grants Crowding Out and Crowding In Donations to Higher Education

Abstract Using a dataset that includes every private donation made to a large public university from 1938 to 2012 and demographic information on all alumni, we examine the effects of public research funding on individual donations. Our dataset allows us to examine crowding effects on a small time scale and extensive donor characteristics. We estimate effects on the total number of donations (extensive margin) and on the average size of a donation (intensive margin). National Science Foundation research grants have a positive (crowd-in) effect on the extensive margin and a negative (crowd-out) effect on the intensive margin. We find no evidence of these effects from other sources of federal research funding. Previous donors and in-state residents respond differently to grants than do new donors and out-of-state residents, respectively.

The impact of geographic inequality in federal research funding: A comparative longitudinal study of research and scholarly outputs in EPSCoR versus non-EPSCoR states.

Some states in the U.S. have traditionally received less federal research funding than other states. The National Science Foundation (NSF) created a program in 1979, called the Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR) to enhance the research competitiveness in such states. While the geographic disparity in federal research funding is well known, the overall impact of federal funding on the research performance of EPSCoR and non-EPSCoR has not been previously studied. In the current study, we compared the combined research productivity of Ph.D. granting institutions in EPSCoR versus the non-EPSCoR states to better understand the scientific impact of federal investments in sponsored research across all states. The research outputs we measured included journal articles, books, conference papers, patents, and citation count in academic literature. Unsurprisingly, results indicated that the non-EPSCoR states received significantly more federal research funding than their EPSCoR counterparts, which correlated with a higher number of faculty members in the non-EPSCoR versus EPSCoR states. Also, in the overall research productivity expressed on a per capita, the non-EPSCoR states fared better than EPSCoR states. However, when the research output was measured based on per $1M investment of federal research funding, EPSCoR states performed significantly better than the non-EPSCoR states in many research productivity indicators, with the notable exception of patents. Together, this study found preliminary evidence that EPSCoR states achieved a high degree of research productivity despite receiving significantly fewer federal research dollars. The limitations and next steps of this study are also discussed.

Urgent need to mitigate disparities in federal funding for cancer research.

We evaluate National Cancer Institute (NCI) funding distribution to the most common cancers, considering their respective public health burdens, and explore associations between funding and racial and ethnic burden of disease. The NCI's Surveillance, Epidemiology and End Results, US Cancer Statistics database, and Funding Statistics were used to calculate funding-to-lethality (FTL) scores. Breast and prostate cancer had the first (179.65) and second (128.90) highest FTL scores, and esophagus and stomach cancer ranked 18th (2.12) and 19th (1.78). We evaluated whether there were differences between the FTL and cancer incidence and/or mortality within individual racial and ethnic groups. NCI funding correlated highly with cancers afflicting a higher proportion of non-Hispanic White individuals (Spearman correlation coefficient = 0.84; P < .001). Correlation was stronger for incidence than mortality. These data reveal that funding across cancer sites is not concordant with lethality and that cancers with high incidence among racial and ethnic minorities receive lower funding.

State of research in adult Hospital Medicine: Updated results of a national survey and longitudinal analysis of national data.

We sought to understand the current state of research in adult Hospital Medicine by repeating a 2018 survey of leaders in Hospital Medicine with changes to improve the response rate of surveyed programs. We also analyzed the public sources of federal research funding and MEDLINE-indexed publications from 2010 through 2019 among members of the Society of Hospital Medicine (SHM). Of the 102 contacted leaders of Hospital Medicine groups across the country, 49 responded, for a total response rate of 48%. Among the 3397 faculty members represented in responding programs, 72 (2%) of faculty were identified as conducting research for more than 50% of their time. Respondents noted difficulties at every stage of the research development pipeline, from a lack of mentors to running a fellowship program to a lack of applicants seeking further research training. Improvements to our research training pipeline will be essential to the long-term improvement of our profession.

Public Access to Federally Funded Research

The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy issued a new memo requiring all federal agencies that fund research provide immediate public access to resulting research data and scholarly publications. This new memo removes the option of a 12 months embargo, and it extends the requirement agencies with less than $100 million in annual research and development expenditures. This column investigates the possible impacts of the broader policy, including introducing the public access requirement to new agencies and academic disciplines, and how a repository approach to public access might intersect with publisher provided open access.

Examining the Influence of Texas’ Strategic Plan for Increasing University Research: Loose Coupling and Research Production at Regional Public Universities

ABSTRACT States have adopted a variety of policies to encourage universities to expand research production, with the hope of supporting economic growth and competitiveness. This paper considers whether a state-level initiative succeeded in influencing university-based research outputs among regional public universities. We test whether the Texas Research Incentive Program increased research production at a set of state universities as measured by total research spending, federally-funded research spending, the number of scholarly publications, and the share of publications published in high impact factor journals. Using a novel dataset and difference-in-differences analytic strategy, we found that TRIP adoption was associated with a 19%-25% increase in research expenditures at emerging research universities in Texas relative to a matched set of comparable universities. However, TRIP did not influence federally-funded research expenditures or journal publication outputs. We also show that federally-funded research expenditures influence publication outputs — both in amount and quality — and that number of full-time faculty influences both federal research expenditures and publication outputs. We discuss contributions to the literature on regional public universities, loose coupling, and research production, as well as implications for policy.

Comment on “Higher Education in the United States: Laissez‐Faire, Differentiation, and Research”

Comment on “Higher Education in the United States: Laissez‐Faire, Differentiation, and Research”