National Institutes of Health
Office of Extramural Research
Mike Lauer
April 28, 2016
NIH grants reflect research
investments that we hope will lead to advancement of fundamental knowledge
and/or application of that knowledge to efforts to improve health and
well-being. In February, we published a blog on the publication
impact of NIH funded research. We were gratified to hear your many
thoughtful comments and questions. Some of you suggested that we should not
only focus on output (e.g. highly cited papers), but also on cost – or as one
of you mentioned “citations per dollar.” Indeed, my colleagues and I have
previously taken a
preliminary look at this question in the world of cardiovascular research.
Today I’d like to share our exploration of citations per dollar using a
sample of R01 grants across NIH’s research portfolio. What we found has an
interesting policy implication for maximizing NIH’s return on investment in
research.
