RCDeCade: 10 Years and Still Counting

Remember hearing those stories about how your grand-PIs had to walk five miles, in the snow, uphill, with no shoes just to learn how NIH spent its research budget? Well, believe it or not, but that was just ten years ago. Today, we have the Research, Condition, and Disease Categorization (RCDC) webtool to do this in a blink of an eye. Now, following the official release of Fiscal Year (FY) 2017 data and updated estimates for FYs 2018 and 2019 last month, we wanted to celebrate a successful decade of service.   With origins stemming from the NIH Reauthorization Act of 2006, and now available via NIH RePORT, RCDC is a helpful resource for investigators, advocacy groups, Congress, and the public to easily see how much NIH spends on certain research areas year by year. Since 2008, we have made regular enhancements to make the system more beneficial to all. Project listings published. Data cleansed. Quality enhanced. Disease burden information added. And, today, 285 categories reported online.   Consistency in RCDC is critical for accurate NIH budget reporting. To achieve this, NIH experts defined boundaries for each RCDC category—akin to a biomedical thesaurus—using an automated text mining tool. Based on the importance of a scientific concept to a category topic, a definition is agreed to by the experts, a match score calculated, and a list of projects produced. Once the experts agree, a final budget report is developed accounting for all obligated dollars in each ...
Source: NIH Extramural Nexus - Category: Research Authors: Tags: blog RCDC RePORT Transparency Source Type: funding