Financial support for research in radiology: a survey of original investigations published in the AJR and Radiology.

OBJECTIVE

This study was done to determine how often the original research published in AJR and Radiology is formally funded by external sources of explicit intramural institutional research grants and to explore the association of financial support with the subspecialty field; type of research (clinical vs basic); number of coauthors; number of departments, nonradiology departments, and institutions participating per paper; country of origin; and citation impact of investigations.

MATERIALS AND METHODS

All 736 original articles published in AJR and Radiology in 1990 were surveyed. The following information was abstracted: the presence or absence of specific funding, as determined from the footnote acknowledgments given by the authors (for the 560 papers from the United States, financial support was further classified according to the funding agency listed first); the subspecialty field of research, as determined from the indexing of the paper in the table of contents; the type of research (clinical, basic, combined clinical and basic); the number of coauthors; the number of departments, nonradiology departments, and institutions participating; the first author's department (radiology, medicine, surgery, medical physics); the first author's institution (university-affiliated medical institution, medical institution not affiliated with a university, National Institutes of Health center); and the country of the first author's institution. Research impact was assessed by using citation counts.

RESULTS

Only 17% of the surveyed studies were formally funded. The 95 funded studies from the United States were federally sponsored (63%), funded by private industry (11%), supported by nonprofit foundations (16%), or funded from explicit intramural institutional monies (11%). Funding was significantly related to the subspecialty field (p = .00007), the type of research (p < .000001), and the category of the first author's department (p < .000001). When papers on contrast media research were excluded from the analysis, the association of funding to the field of research became statistically insignificant (p = .21). Financial support was not significantly related to the category of the first author's institution (p = .71) or to whether the research was done in the United States (p = .71). A statistically significant positive association was found between funding and the number of coauthors (p = .013), the number of departments (p = .049), nonradiology departments (p = .004), and institutions participating per paper (p = .018). Funded papers were cited more extensively than nonfunded papers (p = .015).

CONCLUSION

Only a small percentage of radiology research attracts formal, especially extramural, financial support. This should be a cause for concern. As the informal funding of investigations from redirected clinical revenues is diminishing, action will be required to procure funds to support the radiology research necessary for the vitality of the specialty.