Is There a Relationship between National Institutes of Health Funding and Research Impact on Academic Urology?

Abstract

There is an association among the h-index, NIH funding and academic rank. The h-index is a reliable method of assessing the impact of scholarly contributions toward the discourse in academic urology. It may be used as an adjunct for evaluating the scholarly productivity of academic urologists.

Assessing National Institutes of Health funding and scholarly impact in neurological surgery

“…Colaco et al recently found a strong relationship between NIH funding, h index, and academic rank among academic urologists. 7 Additionally, Svider et al reported a similar relationship among funded and nonfunded academic otolaryngologists, noting that this objective bibliometric may have utility as an adjunct in the academic advancement process among faculty in either cohort. 37 Although these findings were similar to those in the current analysis, one interesting area of difference relates to the terminal degree an NIH-funded faculty member possesses.…”

“…These issues and other potential limitations of the h index have been widely reported in the literature. 3,7,9,10,[12][13][14][15]18,23,25,26,[28][29][30]35,[39][40][41] Despite these known limitations, the h index is an objective measure that takes into account the frequency with which a faculty member has had an impact upon scholarly discourse within a field and has been shown in many analyses to have a strong association with academic promotion, receiving external funding, graduate medical education, and a variety of other factors measuring achievement.…”

“…The h index is a bibliometric whose use has been previously described among academic physicians in neurological surgery as well as in other specialties. 6,7,9,10,12,21,[23][24][25][26][27]29,31,32,[35][36][37][38][39][40] It has been shown to have a strong association with scholarly impact, academic advancement, National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding procurement, and other measures of scholarly productivity. It is a widely accessible and easily calculable measure that indicates the degree to which an author is frequently cited on a regular basis, throughout his or her body of work (rather than disproportionate citation of a single work).…”

“…7,11,19,22,32,39,42 Nonetheless, there is little available evidence that this organization takes into account the scholarly impact of applicants with objective bibliometrics that assess scholarly relevance, such as the h index. 7,11,39 The objective of this present analysis was to determine whether there is an association between scholarly impact, as measured by the h index, and successful NIH grant funding awarded to faculty in neurological surgery departments.…”

Determining the Drivers of Academic Success in Surgery: An Analysis of 3,850 Faculty

“…However, to date, little work has been done to determine metrics of faculty academic productivity within specific disciplines. At present, limited examinations focused mostly on publications and citations have been reported in subsets of physicians in relatively few specialties [18][19][20] [21,22] [23,24] [20,25] [ 20,26]. To date, no such examination has been done within the field of surgery.…”