National Institutes of Health - NIH Research Portfolio Online Reporting Tool (RePORT)
 
About the Information Available in RePORTER

The information found in RePORTER is drawn from several extant databases–eRA databases, Medline, PubMed Central, the NIH Intramural Database, and iEdison–using newly-formed linkages among these disparate data sources. The comprehensiveness of these databases varies, as does the quality of the linkages formed among them. We expect that the quality of RePORTER data will improve over time as a result of changes in both data collection (e.g., implementation of the NIH Public Access policy) and the increased ability to identify missing information that comes from making these data accessible to more people.
Below are some important things to keep in mind when using RePORTER:
Currency of the Data
In general, the RePORTER database of research projects is updated weekly. Each update includes not only the addition of newly-funded projects, but also revisions to prior awards (e.g., change of grantee institution or revised award amounts). There are several exceptions to certain portions of the database:
  • Costs for subprojects on multi-project grants (e.g., program projects and centers) are frozen at the end of each fiscal year. The costs of these projects will not change even if there is a subsequent revision in the parent grant award. Any changes in total awarded costs for the grant are reflected in the total cost of the parent award only. As a result, the sum of the subproject costs will no longer equal the total cost of the parent award.
  • All information on intramural projects (e.g., titles, abstracts, publications, patents) funded in a fiscal year is added to RePORTER at the conclusion of that year. Searches for for “Current Projects” in RePORTER will generate a list of the latest records available; typically, projects funded in the previous fiscal year.
Searching by Fiscal Year
  • Current Projects: Unless specified, RePORTER searches for “Current Projects;” the most recent record of projects that have not yet reached their end date (in the case of extramural grants and contracts) or intramural projects from the most recent database of annual reports from the NIH intramural programs. (Information on intramural projects is updated in RePORTER at the close of each fiscal year.) This means that the results of “Current Year” searches may include projects that were funded with an earlier fiscal year’s appropriation but are still active (e.g., extramural awards in a no-cost extension period) or not yet updated by the end-of-year intramural project report.
  • Prior Years: Searches conducted on fiscal years prior to the current year will produce lists of only those awards funded in the chosen fiscal year.
Publications
  • Publications are associated with projects, but cannot be identified with any particular year of the project or fiscal year of funding. This is due to the continuous and cumulative nature of knowledge generation across the life of a project and the sometimes long and variable publishing timeline.
  • Some publications will be inadvertently linked to the wrong grant or missing altogether. The association of a publication to NIH-funded extramural research requires that the author(s) acknowledge NIH support in the article and that the acknowledgement be in a form that can be readily associated with a specific grant or contract. Variations in the format used to cite NIH funding will lead to either an inability to make an association or erroneous matches of publications to grants and contracts. The quality of these associations will increase with implementation of the NIH Public Access policy which assures linkages between publications and NIH grants and contracts, and the development and implementation of better data mining techniques.
  • RePORTER lists only publications found in PubMed or PubMed Central. There are publications resulting from NIH-funded research that appear in journals that are not part of the PubMed collection and published before the NIH Public Access policy went into effect.
Patents

  • Patents are associated with projects, but cannot be identified with any particular year of the project or fiscal year of funding. This is due to the continuous and cumulative nature of knowledge generation across the life of a project and the sometimes long and variable patenting timeline.
  • Patent information in RePORTER is incomplete. The patents in RePORTER come from the iEdison database. Not all recipients of NIH funding are compliant with the iEdison reporting requirements, particularly after their NIH support has ended.
Grant and Contract Costs
  • Except in the case of multi-year funded grants, they do not represent the costs over the life of the project. Costs shown in RePORTER are the total costs (direct + indirect costs) awarded in a single fiscal year.
  • No cost information for years prior to 2008 is available in RePORTER. The decision to make available the total costs of grants and contracts began with the 2008 fiscal year.
Project Categorization
  • Beginning with projects funded in FY 2008, the research, condition, and/or disease category in which a project falls is determined by an automated text-mining tool. See the Research, Condition, and Disease Categorization Process for a complete description of this categorization process.
Project Terms
  • Beginning with projects funded in FY 2008, project terms are concepts derived by mining the text of a project’s title, abstract, specific aims, and investigator’s stated public health relevance. For projects funded in fiscal years prior to 2008, the project terms in RePORTER are the same terms used in the NIH CRISP system that RePORTER replaces. See the Research, Condition, and Disease Categorization Process for a complete description of this text mining process.
  • Term searches that span fiscal years before and after 2008 will not be comparable. There is no simple and direct association between the CRISP terms used prior to 2008 and the project concepts derived through text mining in 2008 and later years.