IMAT Publication Trends
Background
The IMAT Program has supported nearly 500 investigator-initiated research project grants through 6 funding mechanisms (R21, R33, R41, R42, R43, and R44) from the program’s inception in 1998 through 2007. The program continues to fund new research awards and currently has 5 strategically-driven funding opportunity announcements soliciting applications for cutting-edge, transformative technologies. The following data is representative of the program’s growth and output as a function of direct project-related publications.
Figure 1. The trend in number of publications in peer-reviewed journals funded citing IMAT grants from 1999 through 2007.
Significant Results
- The number of publications citing IMAT grants markedly increased in the first 4 years of funding, after which the numbers remained steady. This result is consistent with a set of new awards that require a few years of research to be able to consistently publish results. Approximately 140 project-related publications were published in calendar year 2007, indicating a respectable level of productivity and dissemination.
Caveats
- The data expressed above includes only publications in PubMed that cite a specific IMAT grant number, which assumes that all PIs are acknowledging this information in the article/publication. The number of project-related publications that result without citation of a specific IMAT grant number can therefore be much larger.
- The data collection also assumes that all journals are publishing the grant numbers and providing them to PubMed. However, it is known that a small number of journals do not report grant numbers to PubMed.
- These results do not differentiate the type of journal article—all types are included. For example, a review, a journal article, and a letter all could be represented in these results.
