Office of Portfolio Analysis, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD, USA.
Division of Program Coordination, Planning, and Strategic Initiatives, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD, USA.
Sci Adv. 2019 Oct 9;5(10):eaaw7238. doi: 10.1126/sciadv.aaw7238. eCollection 2019 Oct.
Despite efforts to promote diversity in the biomedical workforce, there remains a lower rate of funding of National Institutes of Health R01 applications submitted by African-American/black (AA/B) scientists relative to white scientists. To identify underlying causes of this funding gap, we analyzed six stages of the application process from 2011 to 2015 and found that disparate outcomes arise at three of the six: decision to discuss, impact score assignment, and a previously unstudied stage, topic choice. Notably, AA/B applicants tend to propose research on topics with lower award rates. These topics include research at the community and population level, as opposed to more fundamental and mechanistic investigations; the latter tend to have higher award rates. Topic choice alone accounts for over 20% of the funding gap after controlling for multiple variables, including the applicant's prior achievements. Our findings can be used to inform interventions designed to close the funding gap.
尽管在促进生物医学劳动力多样性方面做出了努力，但美国国立卫生研究院（NIH）R01 申请的资金支持仍相对较低，由非裔/黑人（AA/B）科学家提交的申请比例低于白人科学家。为了确定造成这种资金差距的根本原因，我们分析了 2011 年至 2015 年期间申请过程的六个阶段，发现其中三个阶段存在差异：讨论决策、影响评分分配，以及一个以前未研究过的阶段，即主题选择。值得注意的是，AA/B 申请人往往倾向于选择研究主题，这些主题的获奖率较低。这些主题包括社区和人群层面的研究，而不是更基础和机制性的研究；后者往往具有更高的获奖率。在控制了多个变量（包括申请人的既往成就）后，仅主题选择一项就占资金差距的 20%以上。我们的研究结果可用于为旨在缩小资金差距的干预措施提供信息。
