Federal funding for biomedical research has “spillover effects” that stimulate new research even beyond the original purpose of the grant, and may bring unexpected benefits, new research suggests. ing.
Researchers have used their own datasets to gain unprecedented views on how scientific funding is spent and the results it produces.
Survey results published in the journal today (April 22, 2022) Science AdvancesShowed that funding for research by the National Institutes of Health is primarily directed at hiring people engaged in grant-funded projects.
But these people, including staff and trainees like graduate students, do more than just work on the grants they hire, are co-authors and postdoctoral fellows in Ohio’s economics research. Enrico Burks said State University.
“Not only publications that are directly related to the grant, but also new research beyond that will significantly increase productivity,” Burks said. “It has this spillover effect that the people supported by the grant create other quality work.”
And the biomedical researcher, who is the focus of this research, has produced more clinical research as a result of receiving more funding-studies directly related to patient care and health-co-authors of the research. Bruce Weinberg, a professor of economics in Ohio, said.
“Funding is actually creating the kind of research that leads to improved clinical outcomes for patients,” Weinberg said.
The key to this research is the UMETRICS dataset available from the Institute of Innovation and Science. Provides detailed information on payments for research projects sponsored by 72 universities.
This allowed researchers to use payments to identify all people (from faculty to trainees to staff) working on NIH-funded research projects.
Later, Berkes, Weinberg and colleagues used the PubMed database to search the UMETRICS database for all research publications created by scientists. They considered NIH grants from 1985 to 2020.
“By tracking the funding, we were able to connect people to research projects,” Weinberg said. “This allowed us to answer questions that were not possible before. How will the money spent on research affect people?”
The results show that 68% of the grant was spent on employees, including faculty, postdoctoral researchers, graduate and undergraduate students, research staff, and other staff.
The findings show that the increased funding has made the lab more specialized by hiring more staff and career researchers. In fact, research and other staff have shown that employment growth is higher than faculty when funding increases.
As funding increased and the research team grew, they produced more scientific papers-and the quality of the research did not decline.
“There is a hypothesis that as a team grows, it becomes more bureaucratic and harder to produce quality science, but the lab remains productive, probably because of its increased expertise. I see, “says Burks.
According to the survey results, the largest increase in papers is due to research not directly related to grants. These are often papers that have not been co-authored by the Principal Investigator, the researcher responsible for obtaining and managing funding.
One way to understand the spillover effect of funding medical research is to look at the number of research papers produced by the people involved in the grant.
Not surprisingly, as a result of additional funding, faculty members have the largest increase in new scientific papers. However, relatively speaking, trainees, including graduate students and postdoctoral researchers, have a large proportion of their dissertations.
“Research funding has dramatically started the careers of trainees and collaborators they have met while working on these funded projects, and of other important issues. You can see how to start the investigation, “says Weinberg.
Funding for biomedical research tends to increase both the number of clinical papers directly related to patient care and other types of medical research, the results show.
The results of these findings may provide the best ever view of how the federal grants awarded for research will be used, Burks said.
“Funders, of course, tend to focus on the impact of funding on the specific issues they fund,” Burks said.
“But they should know how their money goes through a wide range of people and produces profits that they may not have expected.”
This research was funded by the National Institute of Aging, Institute of Behavioral Social Sciences, National Institute of Medical Sciences, National Center for Advanced Translational Sciences, National Science Foundation, and Ewing Marion Kaufman and Alfred P. rice field. .. Sloan Foundation.
Other authors of this study were former postdoctoral fellow Reza Sattari and Jung Bae, a PhD graduate of The Ohio State University.
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