SynthesisProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2020
NIH funding and the pursuit of edge science.
Synthesis in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 30 papers, 2 of them syntheses that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
30 citing papers in PubMed, 2 syntheses or guidelines pooled it.
- The characteristics of early-stage research into human genes are substantially different from subsequent research.PLoS biology · 2022Pooled it
- NIH funding and the pursuit of edge science.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2020Pooled it
- Comparing the outputs of intramural and extramural grants funded by National Institutes of Health.eLife · 2026Article
- A digital archive reveals how a funding agency cooperated with academics to support the nascent field of genomics.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Analysis of National Institutes of Health funding for back pain research in the United States.North American Spine Society journal · 2026Article
- Sustaining the Biomedical Workforce: Innovative Pathways for Retaining and Supporting Physician-Scientists.NAM perspectives · 2026Review
- Spinal cord injury research and national institutes of health funding: a call to action.Spinal cord · 2026Article
- A thirty-year trend of increasing clinical orientation at the National Institutes of Health.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- CAR-Based Cell and Gene Therapies: Global Clinical Landscape and Emerging Therapeutic Strategies from ClinicalTrials.gov.Biomolecules & therapeutics · 2025Review
- Scientific publications that use promotional language in the abstract receive more citations and public attention.Communications psychology · 2025Article
- Assessing the scientific and economic impacts of the experiments conducted onboard the International Space Station.NPJ microgravity · 2025Article
- How the National Library of Medicine should evolve in an era of artificial intelligence.Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association : JAMIA · 2025Article
- Communities Started the End of the HIV Epidemic: Experiences With and Recommendations for Conducting Community-Engaged HIV Implementation Research.Journal of acquired immune deficiency syndromes (1999) · 2025Article
- Article
- Machine Learning on 50,000 Manuscripts Shows Increased Clinical Research by Academic Cardiac Surgeons.The Journal of surgical research · 2024Article
- Why are clinical trials of deep brain stimulation terminated? An analysis of clinicaltrials.gov.World neurosurgery: X · 2024Article
- Promotional language and the adoption of innovative ideas in science.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- The rise of automated curiosity-driven discoveries in chemistry.Chemical science · 2023Review
- Data, measurement and empirical methods in the science of science.Nature human behaviour · 2023Review
- SciSciNet: A large-scale open data lake for the science of science research.Scientific data · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
Abstract
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) plays a critical role in funding scientific endeavors in biomedicine. Funding innovative science is an essential element of the NIH's mission, but many have questioned the NIH's ability to fulfill this aim. Based on an analysis of a comprehensive corpus of published biomedical research articles, we measure whether the NIH succeeds in funding work with novel ideas, which we term edge science. We find that edge science is more often NIH funded than less novel science, but with a delay. Papers that build on very recent ideas are NIH funded less often than are papers that build on ideas that have had a chance to mature for at least 7 y. We have three further findings. First, the tendency to fund edge science is mostly limited to basic science. Papers that build on novel clinical ideas are not more often NIH funded than are papers that build on well-established clinical knowledge. Second, novel papers tend to be NIH funded more often because there are more NIH-funded papers in innovative areas of investigation, rather than because the NIH funds innovative papers within research areas. Third, the NIH's tendency to have funded papers that build on the most recent advances has declined over time. In this regard, NIH funding has become more conservative despite initiatives to increase funding for innovative projects. Given our focus on published papers, the results reflect both the funding preferences of the NIH and the composition of the applications it receives.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.