Health & Medicine
Central Database for Grant Proposals Needed: Research Shows
Staff Reporter
First Posted: Jan 30, 2013 11:22 PM EST
Funding agencies may be paying out duplicate grants, according to new study.
Analysis done by the Virginia Bioinformatics Institute at Virginia Tech shows that millions of dollars in funding may be used inappropriately.
Using special software, the investigators compared more than 630,000 grant and contract summaries submitted to five of the largest U.S. funding agencies since 1985. They then manually reviewed projects with the highest similarity scores.
According to the findings, published in the Comment section of the current issue of the journal Nature, nearly $70 million may have been spent on projects for which a portion of the research was already being funded.
To estimate the extent of double-funding, Garner and his team, including programmer Lauren McIver, systematically compared 858,717 funded grant and contract summaries using text-similarity (text mining) software followed up by manual review.
Although the researchers could not definitively determine whether the similar grants were true duplicates-this would require access to the full grant files, which were not publicly available-they found strong evidence that tens of millions of dollars may have been spent on grants where at least a portion was already being funded. In the most recent five years (2007-2011), they identified 39 similar grant pairs involving more than $20 million.
"A central database for all grant proposals would be an excellent first step," Garner concluded.
However, they added, "some of the potential duplicate grants we discovered with our software may have already been identified by the relevant agencies, which may have adjusted the award amount accordingly without updating summaries."
See Now:
NASA's Juno Spacecraft's Rendezvous With Jupiter's Mammoth Cyclone
©2024 ScienceWorldReport.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. The window to the world of science news.
More on SCIENCEwr
First Posted: Jan 30, 2013 11:22 PM EST
Funding agencies may be paying out duplicate grants, according to new study.
Analysis done by the Virginia Bioinformatics Institute at Virginia Tech shows that millions of dollars in funding may be used inappropriately.
Using special software, the investigators compared more than 630,000 grant and contract summaries submitted to five of the largest U.S. funding agencies since 1985. They then manually reviewed projects with the highest similarity scores.
According to the findings, published in the Comment section of the current issue of the journal Nature, nearly $70 million may have been spent on projects for which a portion of the research was already being funded.
To estimate the extent of double-funding, Garner and his team, including programmer Lauren McIver, systematically compared 858,717 funded grant and contract summaries using text-similarity (text mining) software followed up by manual review.
Although the researchers could not definitively determine whether the similar grants were true duplicates-this would require access to the full grant files, which were not publicly available-they found strong evidence that tens of millions of dollars may have been spent on grants where at least a portion was already being funded. In the most recent five years (2007-2011), they identified 39 similar grant pairs involving more than $20 million.
"A central database for all grant proposals would be an excellent first step," Garner concluded.
However, they added, "some of the potential duplicate grants we discovered with our software may have already been identified by the relevant agencies, which may have adjusted the award amount accordingly without updating summaries."
See Now: NASA's Juno Spacecraft's Rendezvous With Jupiter's Mammoth Cyclone