How Are Schools and Departments Assigned to NIH Grants?

For decades, NIH has collected and curated information on the schools and departments associated with the grants awarded to domestic higher education academic institutions to provide statistics on the fields contributing to advances in biomedical research. This information appears in NIH RePORTER (Figure 1), NIH Awards by Location and Organization, and other reports issued by NIH. To facilitate uniform reporting, NIH aligns the schools and department names used by institutions to standard lists of school types and department types. Figure 1 Signing officials can ensure the accuracy of their institution’s assignment through tools in the eRA Commons (Figure 2). They can also edit this information for awards themselves or request manual corrections through the eRA Service Desk. To help facilitate review by signing officials, we send annual reminders towards the end of each fiscal year, such as this Guide Notice from 2020, reminding our recipients verify the accuracy of the grant assignments. Figure 2 NIH uses automated procedures to propose a school and department assignment based on information from the SF424 (R&R) grant application. The Division field is used to determine a school or major component (e.g. School of Public Health) and the Department field is used to determine the academic department. Figure 3 Our systems follow this order of operations when making school and department assignments: Machine-learning approaches using text provided in the application and m...
Source: NIH Extramural Nexus - Category: Research Authors: Tags: You Ask, We Answer RePORTER Source Type: funding