Inequalities in the distribution of National Institutes of Health research project grant funding
- National Institutes of Health, United States
Abstract
Previous reports have described worsening inequalities of National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding. We analyzed Research Project Grant data through the end of Fiscal Year 2020, confirming worsening inequalities beginning at the time of the NIH budget doubling (1998-2003), while finding that trends in recent years have reversed for both investigators and institutions, but only to a modest degree. We also find that career-stage trends have stabilized, with equivalent proportions of early-, mid-, and late-career investigators funded from 2017 to 2020. The fraction of women among funded PIs continues to increase, but they are still not at parity. Analyses of funding inequalities show that inequalities for investigators, and to a lesser degree for institutions, have consistently been greater within groups (i.e., within groups by career stage, gender, race, and degree) than between groups.
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Funding
National Institutes of Health
- Michael S Lauer
National Institutes of Health
- Deepshikha Roychowdhury
The authors are both full-time employees of the NIH and conducted this work as part of their official United States federal government duties.
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This is an open-access article, free of all copyright, and may be freely reproduced, distributed, transmitted, modified, built upon, or otherwise used by anyone for any lawful purpose. The work is made available under the Creative Commons CC0 public domain dedication.
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Inequalities in the distribution of National Institutes of Health research project grant funding
eLife 10:e71712.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.71712
