Searching for Grant Funding in PubMed

I am often asked how best to find out which papers have cited a particular grant. Searching PubMed is the best solution.

The National Library of Medicine resource “Finding Support (Grant) Information in Medline/PubMed (2012) http://www.nlm.nih.gov/bsd/funding_support.html  explains the Publication Types included in MeSH vocabulary to identify financial support of the research that resulted in the published papers when that support is mentioned in the articles.  

In 1981, NLM began to carry the actual grant number for PHS grants, just as it appears in the original article, in the MEDLINE citation. No attempt is made to standardize the format of the grant numbers, except for the prefix portion where the correct format contains the number ’0′ (zero) and not the letter ‘O’, e.g.: R01 and not RO1. A computer algorithm scans the grant number to isolate the 2-letter grant code and then adds the agency/institute acronym to the citation. The data are only as dependable as the original source.

The best way to search PubMed for an individual NIH grant number is to use an 8-character string portion with the search tag [gr]. The trick is to remember to use an 8-character string starting with the 2-letter code for the institute and the 6-digit portion with no spaces or hyphens. That 6-digit portion is often published as only a 5-digit portion minus the leading zero which you will have to insert for the most comprehensive retrieval.

Example (from: http://www.nlm.nih.gov/pubs/techbull/mj06/mj06_grant_numbers.html)

Here are some of the ways that the grant number R01 HL060133-01 appears in MEDLINE/PubMed citations:

Using the recommended search  hl060133 [gr] retrieved articles that included all the variations represented above.

The NIH Public Access plan enables NLM to associate NIH grant numbers with author manuscripts submitted to PubMed Central®. The grant numbers derived from this process are also included in PubMed citations to the final, published article. (NLM began to add these grant numbers on March 24, 2006.) These grant numbers may be associated after the article is published.

Investigators may associate grant numbers with papers during the PubMed Central manuscript submission process.  See how: http://www.nihms.nih.gov/help/AG/AG.pdf 

Another route is to use the Award feature in “My Bibliography” to manage compliance with the NIH Public Access Policy. Authors can use either the NIH Funding Link or the pop up wizard to add a grant to a specific article. Detailed instructions: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK53595/#mybibliography.Managing_Compliance_to_th 

Confusing? Contact Lee Vucovich

For details and many other links to NLM Technical Bulletin Articles and NLM Web pages, see: http://www.nlm.nih.gov/bsd/funding_support.html