NIH Updates Funding Report

NIH recently updates its Research Portfolio Online Reporting Tool (RePORT), which estimates the amount of research dollars being spent for various research, condition and disease categories.

According to NIH:

“At the request of Congress, the NIH embarked on a process to provide better consistency and transparency in the reporting of its funded research. This new process, implemented through the Research, Condition, and Disease Categorization (RCDC) system, uses sophisticated text data mining (categorizing and clustering using words and multiword phrases) in conjunction with NIH-wide definitions used to match projects to categories.

“The definitions are a list of terms and concepts selected by NIH scientific experts to define a research category. Due to significant methodology changes, it is likely that annual totals for categories (year over year) will exhibit a noticeable one-time adjustment. The research category levels represent the NIH’s best estimates based on the category definitions.”