News and Publications

Together with collaborators in the NIH Office of Intramural Research, OPA has published an analysis of the early outcomes of the Lasker Clinical Research Scholars Program, which launched in 2011 in response to the decades-long decrease in U.S. clinician scientists. This analysis revealed that all the Lasker scholars are substantially involved in clinical and translational research, and their productivity matches or exceeds that of a matched cohort of early-stage investigators at U.S. academic institutions.

Read the research article as published in Academic Medicine.

OPA Director Dr. George Santangelo presented the new iSearch suite of analytical tools to the NIH Council of Councils on January 28, 2022. New iSearch will be a comprehensive portfolio analysis platform for NIH/HHS and public users currently being developed by OPA. More information about the vision for new iSearch and progress toward its development can be found in his presentation slides and videocast of the meeting.

OPA released a strategic plan to establish how the office will accelerate biomedical research by supporting data-driven decision making. The plan outlines three objectives to help optimize investments in biomedical research and promote best practices for portfolio analysis at NIH and the broader research community. This is the first time OPA has published a strategic plan, signifying a new phase in the office’s work and development.

Read our strategic plan

OPA released a request for information (RFI) to learn about how the scientific community accesses information about biomedical topics. Specifically, we are seeking input on the research databases or tools used and what functionalities the community finds most helpful.

We also want to know what functionalities are desired, such as more search filters or ways to visualize results. Participation is voluntary. Your feedback will advance the fundamental understanding of how scientific data sources and tools are used.

The RFI takes 5-10 minutes to complete and closes on 10/15/21.

Share your responses with us here.

Together with our collaborators in the Surgical Oncology Program at NCI, OPA published an analysis of NIH funding for surgeon scientists. The analysis revealed that there has been an increase in NIH-funded surgeon scientists between 2010 and 2020 and that these investigators have diversified their interests over time to include more clinical research in addition to basic science. 

Read the research articledisplay-none and an  invited commentarydisplay-none contextualizing the results published in February 2021 in the Journal of the American College of Surgeons.

The OPA team has posted a research paper examining the role of mentoring, and in particular mentor gender, on the productivity of scientists early in their careers. Such efforts have been limited in the past due to difficulties in unambiguously linking mentees to their mentors, and measuring the research productivity resulting from those relationships. OPA uses its novel author disambiguation method to investigate the role of self-identified gender in mentorship of trainees applying for NIH fellowships, applying a multi-dimensional framework to assess research productivity. The analysis finds that, after normalizing for the funding level of mentors, the productivity of female and male mentees is indistinguishable, and is independent of the mentor gender, other than in measures of clinical impact, where women mentored by women outperform other mentee-mentor dyads. Read the article here.

It has also been posted to bioRxivdisplay-none.

OPA has launched iSearch v2.5 with new features added to iSearch and the Portfolio Tool. iSearch is NIH’s next-generation portfolio analysis platform, providing comprehensive, easy-to-use access to a carefully curated, extensively linked data set of grants, patents, publications, clinical trials, and approved drugs.

New features in iSearch v2.5 include:

• Functionality to allow the user to select the content fields to use in the Foamtree visualizations and save defaults
• Increased record limit for interactive transfer between iSearch modules with filter functionality if the record set exceeds the new limit to continue the interactive transfer process
• Option to export as an RIS file for use in citation software
• Relevance score for search results is now an exportable field
• Notice of Special Interests (NOSI) field added to the Grants module
• Primary PCC is searchable and facetable in the Grants module (previously, only All PCC(s) and Main PCC(s) were available)
• Clinical Impact flag added to the Grants module
• Info icons are available in advanced filters providing quick access to definitions and help text

New features in iSearch – Portfolio Tool include:

• Date Added has been added to portfolios as a facet and advanced filter enabling users to quickly identify new records, or subsets added on a particular date
• Portfolio owner/manager can set initial default fields to view in record, table and facet view for all portfolio users via user preferences
• Ability to copy an entire portfolio (previously, you could only copy curatable fields from an existing portfolio)
• Info icons are available in select locations within portfolios providing quick access to definitions and help text
• More robust warnings have been added to the keyword highlight functionality in portfolios to guide users

View the one-pager for a brief overview of the new features in iSearch v2.5: iSearch one-pager or watch the video tutorialdisplay-none for a brief demonstration of the new features. If you require access to iSearch, please send us an emaildisplay-none.

The OPA training team provides virtual classroom training in the use of iSearch and the iSearch – Portfolio Tool. You can find further details, and register for class, here.

As always, we are interested to hear what you think about the tool. The v2.5 functionality has been added as a result of feedback from users. Please let us know what you think about the tool and new features by using the ‘Submit Feedback’ button in iSearch or send us an emaildisplay-none. Happy searching! The iSearch team

OPA has developed and launched the iSearch COVID-19 Portfolio tool, a resource for probing a comprehensive portfolio of publications and preprints curated by subject-matter experts to focus entirely on COVID-19 or SARS-CoV-2. Our COVID-19 Portfolio tool leverages the cutting-edge analytical capability of the iSearch platform and includes peer-reviewed articles from PubMed and preprints from arXiv, bioRxiv, ChemRxiv, medRxiv, Research Square, and SSRN. It is updated daily with the latest available data, enabling users to explore and analyze the rapidly growing set of advances in COVID-19 research as they accumulate in real-time.

iSearch is NIH’s next-generation portfolio analysis platform, providing comprehensive, easy-to-use access to a carefully curated, extensively linked data set of global grants, patents, publications, clinical trials, and drugs.

Bibliometric analyses focused on determining the impact of a portfolio of grants or publications rely on accurate, reliable citation data. Historically, citation data have remained locked behind restrictive licensing agreements, hampering the ability of researchers to identify reference linkages between scientific articles. To address this barrier, the NIH Open Citation Collection (NIH-OCC) was created using unrestricted data sources and full-text articles that have been made freely available on the internet. This dataset underlies the updated version of iCite and has been made publicly available in the Open Cites module. These data can be used to perform reproducible, trustworthy bibliometric analyses.

Methodology used to create the NIH-OCC was published in PLOS Biology. Full article access is available heredisplay-none.

Link to iCite 2.0

Fundamental research can take decades to translate into clinical outcomes. To reduce this time interval and speed up the discovery of human therapeutics, a machine learning model was created by OPA researchers to accurately predict whether a scientific publication will have an impact on clinical research. These studies, recently published in PLOS Biology, demonstrate that with as little as two years of post-publication citation data, OPA scientists were able to accurately predict whether an article will eventually be cited by a clinical article (clinical trial or guideline). This article-level metric, the Approximate Potential for Translation (APT), can be used by decision-makers hoping to identify research with a high likelihood to contribute to clinical outcomes and is available to the public in the Translation module of the OPA-created iCite 2.0 tool.

Full article access is available heredisplay-none.

Link to iCite 2.0

In a study published in the journal Science Advances, researchers with the NIH Office of Portfolio Analysis (OPA) found that African-American/black (AA/B) scientists that apply for NIH R01 funding are more likely to study topics with lower funding rates. Topic choice alone accounted for 20% of the observed funding gap after controlling for multiple variables. Community and population-level research tend to receive more AA/B applicants compared with fundamental/mechanistic topics, the latter tend to have higher award rates. These findings can be used to assist with the direction of future funding priorities within the NIH.

Full article access is available heredisplay-none.

The OPA Director discusses next generation portfolio analysis, and using RCR as one component of a diverse, multifaceted assessment.

Full article access is available heredisplay-none.

Response to critique of the Relative Citation Ratio (RCR), objecting to the construction of both the numerator and denominator of the metric. While we strongly agree that any measure used to assess the productivity of research programs should be thoughtfully designed and carefully validated, we believe that the specific concerns outlined in the correspondence are unfounded.

Full article access is available heredisplay-none.

Relative Citation Ratio (RCR) press release.

Link to press release

We describe here an improved method to quantify the influence of a research article by making novel use of its co-citation network to field-normalize the number of citations it has received.

Full article access is available heredisplay-none.