Inequalities in the Distribution of National Institutes of Health Research Project Grant Funding

We present the data in descending order of funding. The PI with the most funding appears at the top, and the PI with the least funding on the bottom. The columns in the table are: PI name (“A” through “J”) Funding: the amount of funding in support of each PI Cumulative Funding: the total amount of funding supporting that PI and all other PIs receiving higher levels of funding (higher up in the Table) Cumulative Proportion of Funding: the proportion of total funding (in percent) supporting that PI and all other PIs receiving higher levels of funding. Table 1 shows one measure of inequality, namely the proportion of funding going to the most highly funded PIs. In this case, we can say that the top 10% of PIs (that is the top one PI in this sample of 10 PIs) were supported by 15% of the funding. Table 2 shows another extreme case, here one where there is near maximal inequality with one PI (the top 10%) supported by 91% of the funds. Table 3 shows what we’ll call an “in-between,” arguably more realistic, case where there is some degree of inequality with the top 10% supported by 40% of the funds. In our paper we similarly used a top-proportion approach, focusing on the percent of funding going to the top 1% of PIs. We used two other measures of inequality: The standard deviation of the log of funding (“SD-log”), a measure thought to reflect more the low and middle rungs of funding. The “Theil Index,” a measure more sensitive to the higher rungs of fundin...
Source: NIH Extramural Nexus - Category: Research Authors: Tags: blog Open Mike Funding data RPG scientific workforce diversity Source Type: funding