GrantMed: a new, international system for tracking grants and funding trends in the life sciences

Abstract

Despite the success of PubMed and other search engines in managing the massive volume of biomedical literature and the retrieval of individual publications, grant-related data remains scattered and relatively inaccessible. This is problematic, as project and funding data has significant analytical value and could be integral to publication retrieval. Here, we introduce GrantMed, a searchable international database of biomedical grants that integrates some 20 million publications with the nearly 1.4 million research projects and 650 billion dollars of funding that made them possible. For any given topic in the life sciences, Grantmed provides instantaneous visualization of the past 30 years of dollars spent and projects awarded, along with detailed individual project descriptions, funding amounts, and links to investigators, research organizations, and resulting publications. It summarizes trends in funding and publication rates for areas of interest and merges data from various national grant databases to create one international grant tracking system. This information will benefit the research community and funding entities alike. Users can view trends over time or current projects underway and use this information to navigate the decision-making process in moving forward. They can view projects prior to publication and records of previous projects. Convenient access to this data for analytical purposes will be beneficial in many ways, helping to prevent project overlap, reduce funding redundancy, identify areas of success, accelerate dissemination of ideas, and expose knowledge gaps in moving forward. It is our hope that this will be a central resource for international life sciences research communities and the funding organizations that support them, ultimately streamlining progress.