TY - JOUR
T1 - A 30-year analysis of National Institutes of Health–funded cardiac transplantation research
T2 - Surgeons lead the way
AU - Narahari, Adishesh K.
AU - Mehaffey, J. Hunter
AU - Chandrabhatla, Anirudha S.
AU - Baderdinni, Pranav K.
AU - Weiderhold, Allison
AU - Cook, Ian O.
AU - Hawkins, Robert B.
AU - Roeser, Mark E.
AU - Kern, John A.
AU - Kron, Irving L.
AU - Yarboro, Leora T.
AU - Ailawadi, Gorav
AU - Teman, Nicholas R.
N1 - Funding Information:
This work was supported by the National Institutes of Health T32 GM007055 . This content is the responsibility of the of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.
Funding Information:
The limitations of this study include its focus on only grants funded by the NIH because we were not able to consider any grants from the United States Department of Defense, National Science Foundation, academic societies, or industry. However, the NIH is the major funding organization for biomedical research in the United States. Only R01s were analyzed in our study because R01s were the most popular grant used to fund laboratories/research projects and are the most common grants awarded by the NIH. It is difficult to compare productivity between different funding modalities; therefore, we focused on arguably the most important funding modality, the R01. We collected departmental information as categorized in NIH RePORTER. This departmental information is self-reported by the grant applicant.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2020 The American Association for Thoracic Surgery
PY - 2021/12
Y1 - 2021/12
N2 - Objectives: Obtaining National Institutes of Health funding for heart transplant research is becoming increasingly difficult, especially for surgeons. We sought to determine the impact of National Institutes of Health–funded cardiac transplantation research over the past 30 years. Methods: National Institutes of Health Research Portfolio Online Reporting Tools Expenditures and Results was queried for R01s using 10 heart transplant–related terms. Principal Investigator, total grant funding amount, number of publications, and citations of manuscripts were collected. A citation-based Grant Impact Metric was assigned to each grant: sum of citations for each manuscript normalized by the funding of the respective grant (per $100K). The department and background degree(s) (MD, PhD, MD/PhD) for each funded Principal Investigator were identified from institutional faculty profiles. Results: A total of 321 cardiac transplantation R01s totaling $723 million and resulting in 6513 publications were analyzed. Surgery departments received more grants and more funding dollars to study cardiac transplantation than any other department (n = 115, $249 million; Medicine: n = 93, $208 million; Pathology: 26, $55 million). Surgeons performed equally well compared with all other Principal Investigators with respect to Grant Impact Metric (15.1 vs 20.6; P =.19) and publications per $1 million (7.5 vs 6.8; P =.75). Finally, all physician-scientists (MDs) have a significantly higher Grant Impact Metric compared with nonclinician researchers (non-MDs) (22.3 vs 16.3; P =.028). Conclusions: Surgeon-scientists are equally productive and impactful compared with nonsurgeons despite decreasing funding rates at the National Institutes of Health and greater pressure from administrators to increase clinical productivity.
AB - Objectives: Obtaining National Institutes of Health funding for heart transplant research is becoming increasingly difficult, especially for surgeons. We sought to determine the impact of National Institutes of Health–funded cardiac transplantation research over the past 30 years. Methods: National Institutes of Health Research Portfolio Online Reporting Tools Expenditures and Results was queried for R01s using 10 heart transplant–related terms. Principal Investigator, total grant funding amount, number of publications, and citations of manuscripts were collected. A citation-based Grant Impact Metric was assigned to each grant: sum of citations for each manuscript normalized by the funding of the respective grant (per $100K). The department and background degree(s) (MD, PhD, MD/PhD) for each funded Principal Investigator were identified from institutional faculty profiles. Results: A total of 321 cardiac transplantation R01s totaling $723 million and resulting in 6513 publications were analyzed. Surgery departments received more grants and more funding dollars to study cardiac transplantation than any other department (n = 115, $249 million; Medicine: n = 93, $208 million; Pathology: 26, $55 million). Surgeons performed equally well compared with all other Principal Investigators with respect to Grant Impact Metric (15.1 vs 20.6; P =.19) and publications per $1 million (7.5 vs 6.8; P =.75). Finally, all physician-scientists (MDs) have a significantly higher Grant Impact Metric compared with nonclinician researchers (non-MDs) (22.3 vs 16.3; P =.028). Conclusions: Surgeon-scientists are equally productive and impactful compared with nonsurgeons despite decreasing funding rates at the National Institutes of Health and greater pressure from administrators to increase clinical productivity.
KW - National Institutes of Health funding
KW - cardiac surgeons
KW - cardiac transplant
KW - heart transplant
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U2 - 10.1016/j.jtcvs.2020.06.076
DO - 10.1016/j.jtcvs.2020.06.076
M3 - Article
C2 - 32768298
AN - SCOPUS:85089078465
VL - 162
SP - 1757-1765.e1
JO - Journal of Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery
JF - Journal of Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery
SN - 0022-5223
IS - 6
ER -