Show me the money: funding informatics research

About 60% of medical informatics papers published in the proceedings of recent AMIA Fall symposia acknowledge receiving some support from American sources for the work. Two-thirds of those citing support include NLM as one of the donors. Papers in JAMIA have even higher funding rates. Funding rates for published informatics papers compare well with papers in a number of other fields. Although medical informatics receives support from a wide variety of sources, the federal government, through the various organizations within DHSS, is clearly the major source of grant and contract support for this field. Within DHSS, NLM is the most frequently cited donor by a large margin. Yet to be determined are the relative dollar values of the support provided by the various donors cited, the difficulty of obtaining funding for informatics projects, the means by which unfunded projects are sustained, and the variation, if any, in the funding success rates of the subfields of informatics.