Biology subjects

Roychowdhury, D.

Publications and source records attributed to Roychowdhury, D..

4 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2022

National Institutes of Health Research Project Grant Inflation 1998 to 2021

We analyzed changes in total costs for National Institutes of Health (NIH) awarded Research Project Grants issued from 1998 to 2003. The NIH uses a data-driven price index - the Biomedical Research and Development Price Index (BRDPI) - to account for inflation based increases in grant costs. The BRDPI was higher than the general rate of inflation from 1998 until 2012; since then, the rate of inflation for NIH-funded research has been similar to the general rate of inflation. Despite increases in nominal costs, recent years have seen increases in the absolute numbers of RPG and R01 awards. Real (BRDPI-adjusted) average and median RPG costs increased during the NIH-doubling (1998 to 2003), but have remained relatively stable since. Of note, though, the degree of variation of RPG costs has changed over time, with more marked extremes observed on both higher and lower levels of cost. On both ends of the cost spectrum, the agency is funding a greater proportion of solicited projects, with nearly half of RPG money going towards solicited projects. After adjusting for potential confounders in a wholly non-parametric machine learning regression, we find no independent association of time with BRDPI-adjusted costs.

scientific communication and education↗

bioRxiv2021

Inequalities in the Distribution of National Institutes of Health Research Project Grant Funding

Previous reports have described worsening inequalities of National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding of principal investigators. We analyzed data through the end of Fiscal Year 2020, confirming worsening inequalities beginning at the time of the NIH budget doubling (1998-2003), but finding that trends have reversed over the past 3 years. We also find that career-stage trends have stabilized, with equivalent proportions of early-, mid-, and late-career investigators funded from 2017 to 2020. Women continue to constitute a greater proportion of funded principal investigators, though not at parity. Analyses of funding inequalities over time show that inequalities have consistently been greater within groups (i.e., within groups by career stage, gender, race, and degree) than between groups.

scientific communication and education↗

bioRxiv2020

emiRIT: A text-mining based resource for microRNA information

MotivationmicroRNAs (miRNAs) are essential gene regulators and their dysregulation often leads to diseases. Easy access to miRNA information is crucial for interpreting generated experimental data, connecting facts across publications, and developing new hypotheses built on previous knowledge. Here, we present emiRIT, a text mining-based resource, which presents miRNA information mined from the literature through a user-friendly interface. ResultsWe collected 149,233 miRNA-PubMed ID pairs from Medline between January 1997 to May 2020. emiRIT currently contains miRNA-gene regulation (60,491 relations); miRNA-disease (cancer) (12,300 relations); miRNA-biological process and pathways (23,390 relations); and circulatory miRNAs in extracellular locations (3,782 relations). Biological entities and their relation to miRNAs were extracted from Medline abstracts using publicly available and in-house developed text mining tools, and the entities were normalized to facilitate querying and integration. We built a database and an interface to store and access the integrated data, respectively. ConclusionWe provide an up-to-date and user-friendly resource to facilitate access to comprehensive miRNA information from the literature on a large-scale, enabling users to navigate through different roles of miRNA and examine them in a context specific to their information needs. To assess our resources information coverage, in the absence of gold standards, we have conducted two case studies focusing on the target and differential expression information of miRNAs in the context of diseases. Database URL: https://research.bioinformatics.udel.edu/emirit/

bioinformatics↗

bioRxiv2017

Marginal Returns And Levels Of Research Grant Support Among Scientists Supported By The National Institutes Of Health

The current era of worsening hypercompetition in biomedical research has drawn attention to the possibility of decreasing marginal returns from research funding. Recent work has described decreasing marginal returns as a function of annual dollars granted to individual scientists. However, different fields of research incur varying cost structures. Therefore, we developed a Grant Support Index (GSI) that focuses on grant activity code, as opposed to field of study or cost. In a cohort of over 71,000 unique scientists funded by NIH between 1996 and 2014 we analyzed the association of grant support (as measured by annual GSI) with 3 bibliometric outcomes, maximum Relative Citation Ratio (which arguably reflects a scientists most influential work), median Relative Citation Ratio, and annual weighted Relative Citation Ratio (which is more dependent on publication counts). We found that for all 3 measures marginal returns decline as annual GSI increases. Thus, we confirm prior findings of decreasing marginal returns with higher levels of research funding support.

scientific communication and education↗