Searching by Grant Number: Bibliometric analysis of cited funding

<p><b>Objectives</b><br> This case study showcases an academic health sciences library's experience with designing comprehensive search strategies for a given grant number. Through our research impact and analysis services, we assist with annual progress reports and funding renewals. Key to this is the identification of recent citations to specific grant support. Award administrators also seek to supplement self-reporting with robust search-strategy alerts.<br> <br> <strong>Methods</strong><br> Using a research center grant awarded by the NIH (P30 grant) as a case study, we will discuss the search strategies developed for the PubMed and Web of Science databases as well as the different indexing practices and result variations. Of particular importance are the common author mistakes in award citations (confusion of letters and numbers, transpositions, missing zeros, etc.) and how each database responds to such scenarios. Since the example center grant covers over 200 associated researchers, the documentation and careful inclusion of common variations is an important element of comprehensive searching. Final search results were compared against NIH RePORTER records (<a href="https://projectreporter.nih.gov/reporter.cfm">https://projectreporter.nih.gov/reporter.cfm</a>) to determine extant of coverage in each databases under the finalized search strategies and the effect of author reporting variations on publication-grant linking.</p> <p><b>Results</b></p> <p>Our results found a total of 15 unique grant variations in Web of Science indexed funding results and 13 unique grant citation variations in PubMed. These variations returned 549 publication results in Web of Science and 851 publication results in PubMed. NIH RePROTER listed 685 publication results linked to our grant of interest. All of the NIH RePORTER listings were returned by the PubMed variations. However, both Web of Science and PubMed returned unique results when compared to the NIH RePORTER listings as well as to each other. Excluding the most current year (2016) approximately 20% of grant citing publications were not captured in NIH RePORTER. For those publications not in NIH RePORTER, 99.9% had PMCIDs so any reasons for exclusion have yet to be determined.</p> <p><b>Conclusions</b></p> <p>Once the citation variations for a given grant have been determined, PubMed offers the best coverage of citing publications. Results should be supplemented with a Web of Science search to capture additional unique articles. Robust analysis of variation possibilities may be needed periodically to ensure that PubMed and/or Web of Science searches or alerts still contain relevant citation variations.