Here’s an interesting offshoot of the ResearchScorecard database: NIH ScoreTracker, a data collection tool intended to help research institutions assess the impact of NIH-sponsored research.

In the specific case at hand, one of our clients needed to identify which grant proposals and publications benefited from services partly paid by funds from the NIH’s Centers for Clinical and Translational Science Awards (CTSA) program. For interesting social reasons, universities have historically been rather poor at tracking the impact of a funder’s support, even one as important as NIH.

For university service providers, this is an especially troublesome problem, because they often service many parts of an institution’s research effort but can’t easily point to specific contributions, for example, providing statistical consulting that eventually helps land a grant proposal.

This gets especially interesting for CTSA grant recipients, because NIH requires that they demonstrate that the funds are indeed impacting the biomedical research process, as is the program’s goal. Problem is, how does one do that? NIH doesn’t provide specific metrics, such that it is up to grantees to identify them, assuming they have the necessary data. In my experience, this is simply not the case, and yet the grantees must satisfy the NIH’s very reasonable request in some way. Interesting, non? Well, OK, perhaps only if you’re a data geek.

Our solution has been to develop a tool that automatically mails a group of researchers with a URL to a survey which is automatically populated by the ResearchScorecard database. NIH ScoreTracker makes it very quick and easy for the busy researcher to identify which publications and grants benefited from an institutional service, such as the services of a statistician paid by CTSA funds. It does so by boiling everything down to a Y/N format — the researcher never has to enter anything else (see screenshots).

Collecting impact for publications

Collecting impact for grants

It doesn’t get any simpler than that, and this is also true for the administrators seeking the data. All they need to do is identify the group of researchers they want to contact, and NIH ScoreTracker will automatically e-mail each researcher until they take the survey. In the absence of a response, NIH ScoreTracker will eventually conclude that an answer is not forthcoming, at which point the administrators are contacted so that they can use their charms to remedy the problem. This is all done automatically.

Beyond tracking successful grants and publications, which aren’t terribly informative measures of the impact of research upon medical practice, more innovative approaches can be envisioned, such as counting literature mentions of techniques and products derived from an institution’s research. For example, much of microarray technology was invented at Stanford University. ResearchScorecard’s database can answer question such as “what is the growth of mentions of microarray-based approaches in the literature?”, which can serve as a proxy for estimating the impact of that research on biomedical research, where impact means “changing the way research is done”. A more involved version of this analysis estimate the dollars spent on the technology over the years to generate an ROI figure. Watch this space for future tools of this nature.

Today we’re introducing our latest search tool, Find Postdoctoral Researcher. As you can guess, it’s about finding (biomedical) postdoctoral researchers.

Why do so? Postdocs are perhaps the main engine of biomedical research, and contacting a postdoc is often essential to a project. Want to learn a technique? Discuss the suitability of an instrument? Compare notes on a set of results? Postdocs are ideal for such.

Problem is, there are very few ways of finding postdocs, especially if a refined list is desired, i.e., not returning every postdocs at an institution.

This is where ResearchScorecard’s Find Postdoctoral Researcher comes in. With it, you can find postdocs based on:

• their area of research expertise, based on publication record.
• the research products they use. We’re particularly proud of that one.
• a PubMed record (i.e., identifying which of the authors of paper are postdocs).
• their family name.

We’ll be adding an additional function shortly, namely, retrieving postdocs by institution. You’d think we would already have that one, but no.

The tool is in its beta phase, and you can let us know how useful you find it by answering the one-question survey at the bottom of the page that comes up once the search is finished. You can access the tool by going to Toosl→Find Postdoctoral Researcher.

Currently, the main limitation is the difficulty of inferring who is a postdoc, so there are a lot of false negatives (folks who are postdocs but are not identified as such). I’m sure ya’ll find lots more additional problems, so please let us know what they are!

examining a researcher's LinkedIn network

We’ve recently added functionality that links our Researcher Profiles to public LinkedIn profiles.

Why bother, you might think? The reasons are eloquently described in an interesting study by a group of researchers in academia, software companies and one of my favorite defense contractors, MITRE Corporation.

Having researched the requirements for expertise location systems for biomedical scientists, one of Schleyer et al.’s (2008) major findings is the need to exploit “… others’ social networks when searching for collaborators”. In plain language, this just means that when considering a collaboration, people find it helpful to understand who is associated with the prospective collaborator, perhaps to determine whether a common contact could perform introductions, but also to get a sense of the person (kind of like in high school, where one is often judged by their crowd). Yes, biomedical researchers are just like everyone else when it comes to socialization.

In short, after perusing the professional and scientific aspects of a potential collaborator, you’ll now be able to jump to LinkedIn to figure out whether there is a contact known to you both that can tell you more about him/her. Neat, huh?

Of course, such “social networking inter-connection” is one thing LinkedIn does admirably well in the professional realm, and so it didn’t take much to convince us to enable our Researcher Profiles to show a link to an individual’s profile when it’s available. Note that you will need your own LinkedIn account to be able examine someone else’s network.

Going back to the study, Schleyer et al. present ten major conclusions derived from interviews and a comprehensive literature review. The interviewees were from Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh. As with all expertise finding studies I know of, the results are retrospective only, since no scientist was actually observed in the process of seeking expertise. Though understandable, this limitation is unfortunate, given the relative inability of human subjects to recall and accurately describe their motivations and thought processes post facto.

We’ve been busy in the last couple of months, with the result that many improvements and new functionality have been added to ResearchScorecard.

First, a login is NO LONGER NECESSARY for most reports. However, you’ll still need to login for making purchases and accessing certain kinds of information, such as a viewing researcher’s grants awarded within the last six months.

Second, a boatload of new functionality has been introduced:

1.  Product Usage report. This report, unique to ResearchScorecard, enables a quantitative analysis of trademarked products used by academic bioresearchers, as reported in the scientific literature. I’ll be writing more on that nifty tool in a later blog entry. Try it here.
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3.  BuddyGrant notifications. We’re very proud of this one! As the name implies, this tool notifies registrants of grants newly awarded to one’s collaborators. As far as we know, this is also a ResearchScorecard exclusive [more].
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5.  Collaborator Network report. This new (well, kind of new) report displays the collaborators of a researcher as known to ResearchScorecard. Remember, we don’t cover all institutions and all time periods, so yes, we are missing some collaborators. This functionality is also available via the Researcher Profile report, but we figured it made sense to make it available on its own as well. Try it here.
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7.  Custom reports. We’ve been generating all sorts of nifty custom reports for Life Sciences vendors interested in developing better sales leads and improving their market awareness. This is another topic I’ll be writing about shortly.