How Many Researchers: the FY 2021 Cumulative Investigator Rate

Our annual snapshot of how many researchers NIH supports is back. As with previous posts, the data presented here are also available in the NIH Data Book and represent awards made with traditional and supplemental coronavirus appropriations. The data are distinct from success rates, however, which are application-based metrics (see this post). Our cumulative investigator rate is an NIH-wide person-based metric. The metric is calculated as the number of unique principal investigators who were designated on an NIH Research Project Grant (RPG), activity or mechanism, divided by the number of unique principal investigators who were designated on applications over a five-year period. For simplicity, we will refer to those investigators as either “awardees” or “applicants” in this post. And, we focus on a five-year timeframe because most research grants last for more than one year, and applicants submit applications with the goal to secure multiple years of funding. We also only count someone once if they are designated on separate awards from multiple NIH Institutes or Centers in a particular five-year timeframe. Figure 1 shows cumulative investigator rate data for RPGs between fiscal years (FYs) 2003 and 2021. Applicants are in blue bars, awardees in orange bars, and the funding rate itself is the gray line. FY 2021 saw 35,179 awardees out of 92,044 applicant investigators, which was a 2.0% and 2.3% increase over FY 2020, respectively. This made for a 38.2% cumulative inv...
Source: NIH Extramural Nexus - Category: Research Authors: Tags: blog Open Mike cumulative investigator rate Funding data funding rate Source Type: funding