Reminders About When to Cite an NIH Grant in a Paper: Overcite Oversight

In 2021, we wrote that appropriately acknowledging NIH grant support allows us to properly assess award outputs and make recommendations for future research directions. This is a term and condition of award under long-standing federal law. Our Grants and Funding site provides guidance: grants should only be cited if they directly supported the work described in the paper and work described in the paper is clearly within scope of the grant award. We still see examples, though, of researchers improperly overciting grants that are unrelated with the research, be it an honest error or intentional. This post revisits the issue as a reminder for the research community about the importance of properly citing NIH grant support and accurately representing funding support for the published study. NIH Grants Policy Statement Section 4.2.1 states “all HHS recipients must acknowledge Federal funding when issuing statements, press releases, requests for proposals, bid invitations, and other documents describing projects or programs funded in whole or in part with Federal money.” Therefore, researchers are required to acknowledge NIH grants that support the work described in their papers, but only if they contributed to the project. Though we do not collect data on how often overcitation happens, we come across it in different ways. We have seen situations where an NIH grant was linked to a paper, yet private sector sponsors or non-federal grants fully supported the research. Some...
Source: NIH Extramural Nexus - Category: Research Authors: Tags: blog Open Mike Compliance Oversight publications Source Type: funding