You may have noticed a culture shift in biomedical research toward transdisciplinary, team-based science, notably described in the Open Mike blog post Impact of Teams Receiving NIH Funding. Whether cultivating partnerships across fields and institutions resonates with your research goals, or you decide to pursue a notice of funding opportunity (NOFO) that requires collaborators, we suggest several resources to develop those pursuits.
Starting Point
A great resource to start is NIH’s Research Portfolio Online Reporting Tools (RePORT). Take a look at the Find Funded Projects and More Using NIH Databases page for an overview of RePORT and its customizable query features that will help you analyze funded projects, investigators, publications, and patents.
RePORT functions can help you address questions you may have, for example—
- Need a snapshot of current research areas that you can save or export and share? Use RePORT Expenditures and Results (RePORTER) to perform Quick Searches, or create custom Advanced Projects Search queries.
- Want to easily find potential collaborators and relevant NIH institutes and study sections to appropriately target your application? Locate projects or NIH program officers based on scientific text that you enter using the Matchmaker function.
- Curious about the current level of support in your subject area? Want to find collaborators by institution, state, congressional district, principal investigator, or funding mechanism? Discover these and more through NIH Awards by Location and Organization.
- Looking for extramural grants, research and development contracts, intramural research, and interagency agreement data on NIH funding for hundreds of categories since fiscal year (FY) 2008 and projections for the current FY? Explore Estimates of Funding for Various Research, Condition, and Disease Categories (RCDC), which supplements funding data with CDC data on mortality and U.S. disease prevalence to provide public health context.
- Interested in extramural grants and contracts, awardee organizations, and the national biomedical workforce? Dive deeper into interactive charts and reports through the NIH Data Book section of RePORT.
This robust resource prompted a previous article, Top Ten Things NIH RePORT and RePORTER Can Do For You, which describes additional features to learn about active cutting edge research, find potential collaborators, assess the level of support and competition for various research areas, and more.
Additional Sources
Other comprehensive resources can help you develop a snapshot of current ongoing research in your field and potentially lead to networking and collaborative efforts.
- PubMed Central is NIH’s National Library of Medicine archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature, where you can conduct free full-text searches. Access to hundreds of NIH portfolio journals, thousands of full participation journals, and millions of articles are at your fingertips to further your access to information and authors who share your research interests.
- ClinicalTrials.gov is a digital repository of up-to-date information on clinical research studies and information about their results. You can search the online database through this website to find clinical trials and observational studies in all 50 states and over 200 countries, as well as expanded access.
- World RePORT can link investigators and institutions collaborating on research projects through its interactive, open-access database and mapping of global research investments from some of the largest international biomedical funding organizations.