Overbuilding Research Capacity (original) (raw)
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The U.S. government doubled NIH appropriations between 1998 and 2003, aiming to foster research activities in biomedicine. However, several indicators demonstrate that the impact of the increase fell short of expectations and triggered unintended negative effects. Compared to pre-doubling conditions, researchers now spend more time writing grant proposals, leaving less time for research. Paradoxically, the probability with which a grant proposal is accepted for funding deteriorated sharply after the doubling. The average age of first-time NIH grant recipients has increased by almost a decade since the early 70’s, while the percentage of biomedical doctorates securing tenured positions drops. These trends represent a threat to the quality and stability of the U.S. biomedical research workforce. Using system dynamics, we test the hypothesis that a sudden and temporary increase in research funds can result in unintended long-term effects hampering research discoveries and workforce dev...
Save American Science from the National Institutes of Health
Two or three times a year, principal investigators closet themselves in their offices for about a month to prepare grant applications for National Institutes of Health (NIH) or similar agencies to ensure funding. It is no longer research as usual but rather a feverish production of pictures, graphs and preliminary experimental data to be incorporated into proposals to make them more attractive. It is a matter of life and death because, somehow, NIH awards have become not only the icing on the cake as was originally intended, but the entire cake. The National Institutes of Health had a rather humble beginning as a bacteriological laboratory "for investigating the origin and causes of epidemic diseases, especially yellow fever and cholera" in 1878. As is typical for all pre-cancerous lesions, the early stages of NIH evolution were rather benign until the creation of the Research Grants Office within NIH in 1946. This office was charged with administering a program of extramural research grants and fellowship awards, with multiple study sections for review of research grant applications. Today, NIH is a monstrously big and complex organization that controls every facet of scientific activity (and, incidentally, livelihood of all scientists) in the United States through awarding or withholding funding for research, presumably, based on merit determined by peer review.
Magnified Effects of Changes in NIH Research Funding Levels
Service Science, 2012
What happens within the university-based research enterprise when a federal funding agency abruptly changes research grant funding levels, up or down? We use simple difference equation models to show that an apparently modest increase or decrease in funding levels can have dramatic effects on researchers, graduate students, postdocs, and the overall research enterprise. The amplified effect is due to grants lasting for an extended period, thereby requiring the majority of funds available in one year to pay for grants awarded in previous years. We demonstrate the effect in various ways, using National Institutes of Health data for two situations: the historical doubling of research funding from 1998 to 2003 and the possible effects of “sequestration” in January 2013. We posit human responses to such sharp movements in funding levels and offer suggestions for amelioration.
Trends in American Biomedical Research: Science, Money, and Politics
Journal of Physical Chemistry & Biophysics, 2012
You cannot do good science in America without good money. True or false? If you are an experimentalist, as most of biomedical researchers are, you can hardly afford high quality and efficient research without substantial funding, so the statement is very much true. If you are a theorist, like many physicists are, you can accomplish groundbreaking discoveries without much funding, so the statement is false. (Einstein changed our view on the universe without any funding.) The issue becomes more complicated given the fact that there is no clear correlation between the level of funding and productivity of researchers in terms of publications.
The Allocation of Publicly-Funded Biomedical Research
SSRN Electronic Journal, 2000
We develop a simple theoretical model of the allocation of public biomedical research expenditure, and present some empirical evidence about the determinants of this allocation. The structure of expenditure should depend upon the relative costs as well as the relative benefits of different kinds of research.
2017
The current era of worsening hypercompetition in biomedical research has drawn attention to the possibility of decreasing marginal returns from research funding. Recent work has described decreasing marginal returns as a function of annual dollars granted to individual scientists. However, different fields of research incur varying cost structures. Therefore, we developed a Grant Support Index (GSI) that focuses on grant activity code, as opposed to field of study or cost. In a cohort of over 71,000 unique scientists funded by NIH between 1996 and 2014 we analyzed the association of grant support (as measured by annual GSI) with 3 bibliometric outcomes, maximum Relative Citation Ratio (which arguably reflects a scientist’s most influential work), median Relative Citation Ratio, and annual weighted Relative Citation Ratio (which is more dependent on publication counts). We found that for all 3 measures marginal returns decline as annual GSI increases. Thus, we confirm prior findings ...