PT - JOURNAL ARTICLE AU - Michael Lauer AU - Deepshikha Roychowdhury AU - Katie Patel AU - Rachael Walsh AU - Katrina Pearson TI - Marginal Returns and Levels of Research Grant Support among Scientists Supported by the National Institutes of Health AID - 10.1101/142554 DP - 2017 Jan 01 TA - bioRxiv PG - 142554 4099 - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/05/29/142554.short 4100 - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/05/29/142554.full AB - 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 scientist’s 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.