NIH Funding Ranked "Per Capita": An Alternative Method for Assessing Research Productivity

Area of Science:

• Nursing Research
• Health Services Research
• Biomedical Research Funding

Background:

• Traditional rankings of nursing schools often use total National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding as a proxy for research productivity.
• These rankings do not account for the varying sizes of faculty, specifically the number of doctorally prepared faculty eligible to apply for grants.

Purpose of the Study:

• To evaluate an alternative metric for assessing nursing school research productivity: NIH funding per capita.
• To compare traditional total funding rankings with per capita funding rankings across top U.S. nursing schools.

Main Methods:

• Extracted NIH funding data for top-ranked U.S. nursing schools from 2013 to 2017.
• Calculated average total funding and average funding per doctorally prepared faculty member.
• Compared rankings based on total funding versus per capita funding.

Main Results:

• Analysis revealed that 33% (4 out of 12) of schools ranked lower in total average NIH funding but higher in average funding per faculty member.
• This indicates that school size significantly impacts traditional funding-based productivity metrics.

Conclusions:

• School size, specifically the number of doctorally prepared faculty, is a critical factor in accurately measuring research productivity.
• Nursing schools should adopt multiple methods, including per capita analysis, to assess their research performance comprehensively.